Table of Contents

1.

This post will make no sense at all if you don’t know what “Focusing” is. Focusing is a method of making info from squishy automatic cognitive processes accessible to deliberate reasoning processes. Here’s an official brief summary of the full procedure as taught by Gendlin. Here’s a post by Duncan I like a bunch, which describes the Focusing-ish thing he does.

2.

Lauren taught a class at an alumni workshop (last year? I think?) called “Creative Focusing”. It resulted in me using Focusing, or something like it, way more often. I didn’t memorize her class, but here’s how I think of creative focusing myself.

Pick an expressive medium. Could be sketching, poetry, music, whatever.

Then, get in touch with a felt sense. You don’t have to name it. But try to get inside of it.

What is “get inside of it”? Right now there’s a tightness in my solar plexus. I can describe it “from the outside” like so: It’s the bottom of a sort of hot, slightly vibrating rod of sensation that goes from my solar plexus to the middle of my throat. The sensation responds to awareness of my immediate auditory environment (I’m in a coffee shop); the solar plexus tightness gets tighter when I pay attention to the tapping of a metal spoon against a metal jar, and starts to wobble a little when I pay attention to the music in the background.

Rather than describing it from the outside, I can also let the felt sense express itself “from the inside”. This is a kind of attentional trick, I think, which seems to involve setting down my personhood story and letting the felt sense consume awareness.

Then, while “inside” of the felt sense, I can begin to act on my creative medium. If I choose (just a few) words, the solar plexus felt sense types this:

wobble siren sharp and hot fight for warming Persian music hold ready parking alarm to protect changing changing changing nothing safe

If I choose to sketch, the solar plexus felt sense draws this:

I resonate as I go, noticing when a word or line or movement feels dissonant, as though it’s coming from somewhere else, and adjusting to stay true to the felt sense.

Lauren claimed during the class, and I agree, that this is what artists are actually doing when they create things. They’re doing additional stuff too, because what I’ve described is merely expression, and art is a kind of communication. Communication is a refined form of expression that usually involves design and editing in addition to expression. But I think the unrefined expression is at the core of art.

Without any further modifications, I’ve found this approach to focusing (if that’s even what it is?) valuable for its purity.

By “purity” here, I mean purity of observation, as in “observe first, infer later”. I mean that the product of the process — the drawing or the poem-like thing or whatever — retains a lot of info that’s super intimate with what I’m actually feeling, and is relatively uncontaminated by my concepts of emotions or my stories about why I’m feeling a thing.

There’s a lot of room for me to go back afterward to examine my drawing “from the outside”, and perhaps reason about the experiences it expresses, without compromising my original sight of the experience. For example, I can step out of the felt sense, look at the drawing, and recognize “ah yes, this looks like my mind marshaling defenses to protect the soft round parts from the sharp chaos of the outside world”. I didn’t need to boot up anything resembling a hypothesis to make the drawing, so my perceptions weren’t (as) warped by the hypothesis while I drew. Now that the drawing exists, I can look back and reason about it, like having a transcript of an important conversation that happened six months ago.

3.

My use of this method has evolved over time.

I no longer draw stuff on paper very often, or make words or move my body. I do all of that sometimes, especially when I'm having trouble concentrating. But mostly I use my imagination. I go inside of a felt sense, then let it “sketch” on my imagination, using whatever imagined medium it likes. I get images, sounds, other bodily sensations, dance moves, scents, and even concepts and stories.

Doing this with the chest tightness (which is now more in the center of my chest and a bit less in my solar plexus): There’s a cold iron vice squeezing something like mochi, a bee hive with visual imagery and sound of bees, and a fairy woman dressed in blue with her hair in a messy bun and longing body language, who splits into two people, one of whom shifts to resignation and slumps over a table and the other of whom flies upward into warm sunlight.

I also use this at different times than I used to. Originally I mainly used it when I felt “something’s wrong”, and wanted to know what. Now I use it as a very general tool for original seeing, any time I expect my stories and concepts are limiting me. I used it to get much better at smelling, for instance, following the guess that food-concept orientation drastically limited my ability to perceive scents.

But my favorite use is when I “find the felt sense of the ground of a proposition”. For example, the coffee shop I’m in right now is a 501(c)3 non-profit that (somehow) helps refugees. So this proposition has been floating around in my head the whole time I’ve been here: “a non-profit coffee shop must be terribly altruistically inefficient”.

To do (something like) creative focusing on this proposition, I first need to find the “ground” of the proposition. It’s sort of a summary of the proposition that contains nearly all of the oomph. In this case, if I articulate it in words, it’s something like “altruistic coffee shop dumb”.

The ground of a proposition is half-way between a System 2 representation of a belief, and the squishy System 1 stuff where expectations live. This kind of “ground” of a proposition is usually associated with a bodily felt sense. Once I find that felt sense, I can get inside of it. (I’ve found that propositions aren’t always in my body. They’re often near my body but outside of it, especially ones I think are false.)

“Altruistic coffee shop dumb” lives in the back of my head where my skull meets my spine. It’s warm and buzzy with a little pinching. When I go inside of it and let it express itself in my imagination, I get a crab with pinching claws, a bunch of pennies pouring through a sieve, a hot lava flow moving outward from the back of my head in all directions, and a mob of dusty yelling people having a giant fist-fight and trying to climb on top of each other.

I can now ask myself, “what about each of these images feels somehow related to expectations?” For instance, the crab with claws involves precision and uncompromisingness and the ruthless reality of supply and demand.

I also use approximately this method, sometimes, when someone asks me a question and I don’t know how to answer. I’ll often find myself scrabbling for a coherent response that I don’t necessarily believe. When I notice this happening, I stop myself, and instead I say, “When I consider that, I imagine [some crazy imagery].” From there I start analyzing the imagery, and drawing conclusions.

The conclusions may or may not make sense, but at least they have more to do with my genuine thoughts on the subject than with some story I want to tell about how my model of the world is coherent and my mind is unified and consistent.

What is "original seeing"? I'm not sure, but when I consider it right now, I imagine falling apart into a million particles of dust that seep into the crevices of the world.

Starting last weekend and going until March, I’ll be spending every other weekend in yoga teacher training, learning how to be a yoga instructor.

I have a lot of reasons for doing this, one of which is that I would in fact like to teach yoga from time to time. But the reason that really convinced me to finally do it is this: My own yoga practice suggests that yoga relies a lot on original seeing, and I have a strong hunch that yoga instructors are largely in the business of inducing original seeing in their students. I’ve recently been pretty focused on questions like, “What are the most efficient tactics for helping other people see what’s actually in front of them?”. So I’m hoping to mine this teacher training program for pedagogical content knowledge about original seeing.

I think I encountered a real gem in the PCK department last weekend, and I’d like to share it with you.

As yoga instructors, we’re encouraged to avoid pronouns during classes. For example, instead of saying “step your left foot forward”, we should say something like, “step the left foot forward”, or just “step left foot forward”.

The meta-teacher gave a few reasons for this, but one of them felt really shiny to me. He said that part of our job as yoga instructors is to “take students out of their stories”. He didn’t elaborate on this, but I think it reveals a lot about what he thinks it’s like to practice yoga and to teach it.

He seems to think that if a yoga instructor says “your foot”, you’re enabling story-telling (whatever that is) in the student, when the target mental state is something counter to story-telling.

I wanted to investigate this, so I invented and tried the following exercise (which you could try too, if you felt like it).

Choose a topic, and write about it for at least five minutes. Avoid person-framing language: Do not use words like “I”, “my”, “mine”, “he”, “they” or “one”.

Further (optional) instructions:

• Begin with a concrete non-social topic like “the breakfast I’m eating right now”.
• If you want to do more, move to some innocuous social thing like “last time I saw my friend Jeff”.
• Then, if you have the hang of it and really want to apply this as a tool, choose a fraught social topic like “the turmoil going on in my community this past week”.

I noticed some interesting things when I did this.

The first thing I noticed was that merely avoiding specific words wasn’t enough to really sink into it (unsurprisingly). For example, I originally failed to include “one” in my list of words to avoid, and had to recognize in the middle of the exercise that using “one” was cheating. So if you do this, you’ll need to seek the spirit of the thing as you go, and notice when you’re falling out of step with it.

I also noticed that I spoke a lot, at first, in terms of bodies, as though watching from the outside. I said “The body writing is finishing breakfast.” And I perceived a sort of trap there. It’s well and good to write about bodies, but I was aware of a searching-for-my-keys-beneath-the-lamp-post feeling. I would begin to form a sentence like “I am finishing my breakfast,” realize the sentence didn’t follow the rules, and then slide toward describing an entirely different observation that would be easier to express in a rules-adhering way.

Following the spirit of the exercise lead me to directly confront the parts of the world I tend to describe person-ly. When I leaned into that, there was a lot that sounded like Focusing a la Gendlin: “there is tightness in this chest, and a searching sensation”.

When I leaned into it more, the words seemed to reveal a lot about how I implicitly believe human minds work. Instead of “the body writing,” I began to say things like “the agency and composition processes currently active”. I wrote, “It seems as though attention in this brain has drifted toward an association region that involves memories, imaginings, and expectations about restaurants and headaches”.

I also noticed that the more I did this, the more I tended to choose phenomenological terminology. Lots of words like “seem”, “expect”, and “a perception of”, things that only speak of the world in terms of immediate experience.

I shied away from statements that bundled together observation, inference, and claim. For instance, just to test it, I wrote, “How strange this is!”, and indeed that statement felt out of sync with everything else I had written. The claim that “the exercise is strange” is such a high-level summary. Reflecting on this, I wrote, “A claim of strangeness follows an assessment of strangeness, which follows a perception of strangeness, which follows small observations, each accompanied by feelings of non-expectation, or dissonance, or other things that together might be summarized as ‘strange’.”

The exercise as stated didn’t actually require adherence to phenomenological terminology, or careful separation of mental motions. A phrase like “How strange this is!” ought to be permitted. It doesn’t obviously presuppose personhood. But for whatever reason, avoiding person-reifying language led me to write like a phenomenologist.

Writing about other people was stifling, but also liberating. It was terribly difficult to write about “the turmoil in my community” without talking in terms of people. But what I did actually manage to write down was quite satisfying. I asked, “What is the current hoping of the active processes guiding composition about which phrases near-by bodies will emit in a week when the brains piloting them attend to association regions involving concepts of ‘community policy’ and ‘consent’?”

There’s a crisp-ness to that question, though its phrasing be cumbersome. The thoughts summoned by that question needn’t pass through complex social filters. Or at least if they do, it’s not the fault of the question itself. It’s a spacious question. It gives about as much room as possible to think about humans as I think about shingles, or music, or any other thing that exists in the universe and doesn’t carry a giant perception-warping story around with it all the time.

And I know there are good reasons to think about people in terms of those big stories we all help each other carry. That’s part of what I like about this exercise: I became much more aware of what work pershonhood stories are doing. Everyone is sort of naked and exposed without them, and perhaps crippled when it comes to complex multi-human relationships. It’s rude to think about people the same way you think of shingles. And “rude” is an extraordinarily person-reifying word.

I also think that social frames may be the greatest obstacle to original seeing.

“One of the things yoga has given me,” said my meta-teacher last weekend, “is clarity to see the truth of the present moment.” I think it gives me the same, and the way yoga teachers talk is probably part of how. A rare and precious clarity is available when I can move, at any time, to a mental space where it would just never occur to me that “I” could step “my” left foot forward.

When I was in Indiana, I took dozens of snapshots of a slide. This slide.

It was out in a field with a whole collection of elderly playground equipment, and I found it visually interesting. So I did a study of it.

In painting, a “study” is a sketch (or multiple sketches) done in preparation for the final painting. It’s an exploration of a subject, with attention to the problems you’ll likely encounter while rendering it. If you’re drawn to the way an article of clothing drapes, for example, but you’re not familiar with the fabric, maybe you try a few ways of painting the fabric, to see what happens. You also experiment with design elements like like color, lighting, and composition. You might learn that to illuminate the flower you want to feature, you’ll need the light to come in at a different angle than you first imagined.

The idea is the same in photography, but the execution’s different. In photography, you can’t use a brush stroke to change the shape of the subject. There are filters and focus tricks and so forth, but film is more like a mirror than a canvas. What you see is what you get. If you want a different picture of the same subject, you’ll have to find a new way of seeing it.

I’m not sure how the professionals do it, but my study of the slide was pretty methodical, at least at first.

I began at a distance. I chose a starting position that filled my frame with the subject, focused, and took a picture. Then I moved a few steps to the left, focused, and took another picture. I did this until I’d moved 360 degrees around the slide.

Then I repeated the same procedure, but from my knees instead of my feet, and I started moving closer.

Next I began to explore the visual experiences of playing on the slide. Walking under it, climbing on it, sliding down it.

By the time I was done with that part, my state of mind had shifted considerably. I felt much less like “I want to take a good picture of a slide”, and more like “I want to know this object’s every mode of being”. It was almost like I was in love with the slide.

I started to take photos that had nothing to do with my concept of slides, and everything to do with this particular slide. Photos from unlikely angles, photos of details that don’t suggest a slide at all, photos of unique opportunities this slide presents for perceiving the environment.

I did a few photo studies on my trip, and they all felt to me like a gradual spiraling inward. They always began with a concept called “slide” (or whatever) and a vague interest. They ended with a fountain of fascination, intimacy, and love for something that meant almost nothing to me before I started.

And I bring this up because the approach I take to photo studies seems like the very same approach I take to solving vague problems, or training new skills when there’s nobody to tell me how to do it.

I think the photo study is a ritual for inducing Original Seeing. It can work with any sort of medium, including introspective. The trick is to build the right kind of camera.

Most of the ideas in this post come from the book Being A Dog: Following the Dog Into a World of Smell by Alexandra Horowitz, which is my favorite nonfiction book I’ve read in a long time. She, in turn, took much of what I discuss from Kate McClean, an artist who makes sensory maps of urban environments. But this is certainly my own take, and the instructions as I present them are at times in conflict with what I think each of those people would suggest.

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Smelling is a skill. Unless you make perfume for a living, you probably don’t know how to smell. Here are what I consider to be the basics of good olfactory practice.

1. Assume that everything has an odor. Assume that every single physical object around you emits volatile compounds that you, personally, can detect. This may not be true, but that doesn’t matter. Pretend, for now, that it is. You’ll learn faster this way.

2. Practice good sniffing. First and foremost, good sniffing means putting your nose right up against the object you want to sniff. Maybe you’re more comfortable picking things up with your hands and holding them a few inches from your face — most of us are — but that’s poor form. Most odorous compounds are heavier than air, and your nose needs to be where the molecules are to ingest them. Plus, when you pick something up, especially a small bit of something, you’re going to be smelling your hand. So pretend you’re a dog. Get down on your hands and knees, if you have to, and bring your muzzle right to the object, until you can feel its surface with the tip of your nose. Then close your eyes, and sniff.

3. To dislodge more of the smelly snuff, try a sharp exhalation through your nostrils right before you sniff. If you watch dogs sniffing, you’ll see that they do this all the time. It makes a surprisingly large difference.

4. You’ll also find more smells by scratching things first, rubbing them, or otherwise disturbing their surfaces.

5. Associate with what you smell. I recommend narrating your thoughts, either by speaking or by writing them down. Let your mind wander, and don’t worry about making any sense. Nouns, verbs, and adjectives are all fair game. So are images, sounds, and dance moves. Treat the smell like an inkblot test. Take a sniff, and say whatever comes to mind. Give it at least ten seconds, but thirty is better. If you haven’t named five things the smell reminds you of, you’re not done smelling it yet.

6. Maybe it’s not clear to you that you’re smelling anything at all. Doesn’t matter. Everything has an odor, remember? You’re having an olfactory experience of some kind, even if you haven’t recognized it yet, so just start associating. You’ll learn about what you smell as you go.

7. “Good” and “bad” are not smells. They’re mostly predictions about whether something is safe to eat. When you judge that something smells “good”, just pass right by that thought, and keep on associating. Same for anything that smells “bad”. If you get stuck at this step, reach for the specific (un)pleasant associations that come to mind while you’re smelling the object.

8. Don’t worry so much about which things smell like which other things. For example, maybe you’ve just sniffed unwashed socks, and thereby invited a familiar compound into your olfactory system. During its stay, you happened upon an association with parmesan cheese. There really is a chemical similarity between your socks and parmesan cheese — namely butyric acid — but what matters is not that the two items smell similar. What matters is that the experience reminds you of parmesan cheese. If you’re always searching for the known relative of a smell, you’ll miss all the scents you’ve never named before. Recognize that “parmesan cheese” has come to mind while smelling, and leave it at that.

Smell Walks

Now that you know the basics, try going for a smell walk. A smell walk is just a walk, but instead of looking at stuff all the time, you relate to your environment primarily through scent. Here are a few more tips for smell walks in particular.

1. When you arrive at a new location, take note of the background smells.
2. Elicit three smells per location.
3. While moving, watch out for momentary smells.
4. Bring a bottle of water. Your nasal passages need to be a little damp to catch the particles.
5. Bring tissues. Some of the particles will irritate your nose.
6. Bring friends!
7. When there’s an especially interesting smell, invite others to share it with you.

I really enjoy smell walks. They feel indulgent and exciting to me, and I love watching the constant discovery and surprise of my friends when I bring others along. There’s a lot of intimacy in smelling.

I’ve done enough smell walks in my neighborhood that I think I can probably estimate my location to the nearest street corner (maybe better) just by smell, if I’m within a few blocks of my house. I think my nose is about as good as average, based on my experiences taking people on smell walks. If that sounds unlikely to you, you’re probably drastically underestimating how good you are at smelling. Humans have much better noses than they tend to think.

Scent is so neglected in human experience. I think it’s largely because we walk on two legs, and use our hands to examine things. We just don’t spend much time down where the smells are.

It makes me sad, because there’s a whole world of olfactory experience that’s never instantiated. If I ask someone about their day, people will tell me what they saw, and maybe what they heard, but almost nobody tells me what they smelled.

And if someone does mention smell, it’s almost always because something smelled either disgusting or delicious. The world is so full of smells, of so many kinds, but hardly anybody notices. I’d like it if more people engaged with the world through scent.

meditate on…

• What have I gained in the past year? In what ways do I feel augmented compared to the self I remember from this time last year? How do I feel about that?
• What have I lost in the past year? In what ways am I diminished compared to the self I remember from this time last year? How do I feel about that?
• What important things do I believe now that I did not believe at this time last year? What are the practical consequences? What does it mean for the world to be the way that it is, instead of the way that I thought it was?
• What sort of person might I hope to be, if I knew I had a few centuries to become them? What is standing in my way of being that version of myself? What will I need to gain before I can become them? What will I need to lose?

make a list of…

• things I need to grieve, but haven’t yet.
• grudges I’m holding onto.
• things I’m grateful for from people I haven’t thanked yet.
• things I’m afraid to ask for.

• bugs.
• things about my living or working environment that get in my way, or could be better.
• things I do mostly because I feel like I’m “supposed to”, or “it’s expected”, or “it’s what I’ve always done”.
• traits exhibited by the people I admire most.
• things that make me feel fear and longing at the same time.
• things I think I’m bad at but have never Actually Tried.
• good-seeming things that feel impossible, but that I’ve never Actually Tried to cause.
• skillsets I want to level up in.
• cognitive habits I might like to install or bolster.
• limitations, incompetencies, or other obstacles that are in the way of gaining a skill I want.
• common experiences it might help to be good at noticing.

• things I would expect from the upcoming year if I were unrealistically pessimistic.
• things I would expect from the upcoming year if I were unrealistically optimistic.
• challenges I might encounter in the upcoming year.
• opportunities available to me now that weren’t available at this time last year.
• things some part of me wants, but that I feel like I’m not allowed to want.
• problems I have no idea how to solve.

• the tiniest actions I could take that would get me closer to one of my goals.
• trigger-action patterns that might cause incremental progress toward a skill I want.
• trigger-action patterns I have by default that are probably getting in my way.
• things I could try every day for a week.
• mental motions I could set a reminder to practice at random for a few days.
• things I'd like to journal about at some point.

write a sentence or three describing…

• what I expect this year will be like.
• what would happen if I just stopped doing one of the things I’m “supposed to do”.
• what I love about a cherished interpersonal relationship.
• what I’d like to change about a cherished interpersonal relationship.
• how I messed up in one of my projects from the past year.
• what I learned from one of my projects in the past year.
• an experience from the past year that reminds me of a way I’d like to grow.
• an ability that might be unlocked by skills I’ve recently gained.
• a best version of myself.
• my current bottleneck.
• the next act in the story of my life.

design…

• a transformative ritual.
• a meditation that cultivates a virtue I’d like to gain.
• a line of retreat for something I’m afraid might happen in the upcoming year.
• a crisis of faith.
• a strategy for capitalizing on the skills I gained last year.
• a weekend retreat.
• a training program.
• a strategy for getting out of the way of something wonderful that could happen.

I want to tell you about my latest cybernetic enhancement: Sony’s new WI1000X noise canceling earbuds. (I’m not getting paid for this, I’m just excited.) Since a bunch of my friends use Bose Quiet Comfort 20 noise canceling ear buds, and that’s what I’ve used for the past year, I’ll do it by comparing the two.

Verdict: I prefer Sony WI1000X ear buds to Bose Quiet Comfort 20 ear buds.

My Sony WI1000X ear buds arrived yesterday. I’ve been traveling around today switching back and forth between them and my old Bose QC20s, deciding whether to keep the Sonys, or return them and stick with Bose.

Notes On Noise Cancellation In General

I’ve tried several over-ear headphones with active noise cancellation, a few over-ear headphones with passive noise cancellation, a couple kinds of high-quality earmuffs, and many brands of ear plugs. For me, in-ear active noise cancellation was best, and the Bose QC20s in particular won out last time I was shopping for noise control (which was a bit over a year ago).

Both the Sony WI1000Xs and the Bose QC20s are in-ear headphones with active noise cancellation (meaning they do some kind of high-tech electronic thing to cancel out incoming sounds, rather than just plugging your ears like, well, earplugs.). The first thing I want to say about both of these is that I find them woefully inadequate for noise cancellation. As far as I can tell, they’re the best options currently available; current tech just isn’t up to the job of granting me sufficient control over my auditory experiences. They do not come close to creating artificial silence, unless the natural soundscape is already nearly silent.

But they do substantially soften audioscapes. A car engine sounds more like an annoying clickety thing and less like a scary monster. A crowd sounds more like an incessant murmur. Screechy bus brakes sound like somewhat quieter screechy bus brakes. And to me, that’s worth a lot.

Bose QC20

The Bose QC20s are The Wirecutter’s top rec, and they’ve gotten quite popular among my friends. They really are shockingly effective, and represent a substantial QOL boost for me. But they are not exactly a delight to interact with, for two main reasons.

First, there’s a battery that hangs at the end of the cord close to my phone. Whenever I move around, and especially when I walk anywhere, the cord tugs on my ears. I find this unpleasant. I’ve always had this problem with wired earbuds, but the battery pack makes it worse. Running with them is nearly impossible, since it’s the same tugging I get with walking, but harder. Worse yet is when I try to use them in a supermarket, because the cord invariably gets caught on the handle of the basket, or on some item I’m trying to put in the basket, and the ear buds are yanked out of my ears. (I’ve actually given up on going to the supermarket, for the most part.)

Second, it makes a quiet high-pitched whine, presumably a result of the active noise cancellation. Which is HORRIBLE. It’s a lot better than the screechy bus brakes I’m trying to block out, but it’s just infuriating that I have to choose between the sounds of my environment, and the awful sound of this device that’s supposed to be keeping me safe. It’s like, “Would you prefer street sounds, or complimentary tinnitus?”. And the only thing you can do about it is exactly what you do if you’ve got tinnitus: Play music or white noise. Again, better than screechy bus brakes, but still not ideal when I’m trying to get away from sound.

For these two reasons - ear-tugging and artificial tinnitus - I’ve taken to carrying the earbuds with me, and only putting them in at the last possible minute, when I just can’t stand the harshness of the environment any longer. (Sometimes that’s five seconds after I leave my house, but I often last much longer.) Which is a hell of a lot better than waiting until the last possible minute and then not having noise-canceling ear buds to rescue me. But it’s a far cry from making me a care-free autistic cyborg.

My other criticism of the QC20s is more minor, but it’s put me back on the market for new noise-canceling ear buds: They’re not super durable.

The rubber stuff that used to cover the battery pack started to tear shortly after I got them, and after a few months it was bad enough that I just removed the covering entirely. The battery pack isn’t as nice to touch anymore, and it makes a slightly louder sound when I set the ear buds on the table. Which is whatever.

What finally did it is the l-shaped connector. The rubber that covers the wires at the neck of the connector has severed, so now the wires are exposed. I covered them with electrical tape, but it’s just a matter of time before the wires themselves give out. Thus, I seek a replacement.

There’s one more thing to note about my experience with the QC20s, and I almost left it out because I can’t put my finger on what’s causing it. But somehow, using them feels… stuffy.

Maybe it’s the specific frequencies they block, or the shape of the ear buds, or the high-pitched whine. I can’t tell. Whatever it is, it feels a little like being under water, and if I use them for very long, especially if I’m not playing music or an audiobook, I start feeling dissociated.

I figured this was just a property of noise control in general, a result of divorcing my audiotory experiences from my other sensory experiences. But so far, I’m not getting this with Sony.

Sony WI1000X

The Sony WI1000Xs are not obviously better at canceling noise. Nor are they obviously worse.

If you told me that you’d measured objectively and found that one blocked more noise than the other, my money would be on Bose. But I wouldn’t bet very much. They’re close enough to equal on that front that despite switching back and forth dozens of times in a few different noisy environments today, I can’t tell if theres a difference in degree of noise cancellation. I suspect they block slightly different frequencies, but I can’t tell which ones. With respect to noise-cancellation, they’re equivalent in practice.

Which is a big deal, since there really weren’t any rivals for the Bose QC20s a year ago. QC20s even outperformed other products in the Bose Quiet Comfort line, including the over-ear QC25s. I haven’t tried the wireless in-ear QC30s myself, but Amazon reviews suggest that people who bought them after owing QC20s were disappointed.

Besides matching the Bose QC20s for noise cancellation, I’m excited about three things with the Sony WI1000Xs.

One, they’re wireless. They’re not as weightless as my ordinary wireless earbuds - I’ve been using Jaybird X3s for running and biking - because there’s still a battery to fuel the noise cancellation. But rather than hanging on the end of a string that tugs at my ears all the time, the battery is a collar that rests comfortably around my neck. It’s very light, and doesn’t bother me at all when I’m walking.

Turns out it’s even light enough that I can pin it to my head with hair clips and use it while working out. It works for inverted yoga poses and everything. Makes me want to replace part of my skull with a battery pack, like a proper cyborg.

Two, THERE’S NO WHINE. There’s a very small static-like noise that I can just make out if I listen for it, but it doesn’t hurt. This tiny static thing is by far the least annoying auditory byproduct of active noise cancellation I’ve encountered so far, and I’m pretty ok with it.

Third, the sound quality is astounding.

High sound quality is something I neither require nor expect in ear buds of any kind, let alone wireless ones with active noise cancellation. But I do care about sound quality; I know it doesn’t matter at all for many people, but I’m one of those music geeks with five hundred dollar audiophile headphones, which I treat like a sacramental religious object. I have a Spottify playlist called “immaculate classical”, and I only listen to those songs on my Sennheiser HD 598s because it sounds blasphemous on any other audio device I regularly encounter.

There’s a specific song I use to test sound quality in headphones: Leopold Stokowsky’s orchestral arrangement of Bach’s Little Fugue in G Minor. (That’s a link to Youtube, where the audio quality is too low and WARNING it will probably auto-play. I actually use the Spottify recording, but not everybody has Spottify.) It’s a perfect song for this, because the orchestra comes in a little at a time, instrument by instrument, weaving a few phrases in and out over and over again. You get to hear how the headphones deliver the same melody in different ranges one after another. Then they all come together at the end and you can listen to the whole range of orchestral frequencies at once.

When evaluating headphones with this song, the main questions I ask are, in chronological order, “Are the oboe and clarinet broad or squished?”, “Is the horn rich or muddy?”, “Are the strings warm or cold?”, “Are the flutes shrill or soft?”, “Does the whole bass section lay flat or rumble?”, and “What is the emotional impact?”.

When I hear this song with broad reeds, rich horns, warm strings, soft winds, and rumbling bass, the impact is the same every time: I giggle, gasp, and shiver with awe. But every part has to be in place. On low-quality headphones, this song does nothing for me.

With the QC20s, the oboes and clarinets are squished, the flutes are sharp, the mi-range instruments are muddy, the bass absolutely does not not rumble, and the whole thing sounds thin. Which is, ya know, par for the course with ear buds. They’re not supposed to be audiophile headphones. The sound quality isn’t bad for ear buds in general - in fact it’s quite good, ordinary $40 earbuds are significantly worse at sound quality - but listening to Little Fugue on them feels sad and empty.

Which is exactly the experience I expected with the WI1000Xs. So when I played Little Fugue on them and found that it sounded more like it does on my Sennheisers than on my QC20s, I was more than a little surprised. It doesn’t match the Sennheiser HD 598s, but honestly it’s not that far behind. I am willing to listen to my immaculate classical list on these, and although that’s not what matters to me in a noise control device, it is certainly the most impressive feature of the WI1000Xs from my perspective. Warm oboes, crisp horns, and god damn rumbly bass on tiny little ear buds! I did not know that was currently possible.

There are only two things I so far disprefer about the Sony WI1000Xs compared to the Bose QC20s. The first is that when the battery cut out, Sony didn’t give me a warning beforehand. Bose says something like “battery level low” around twenty minutes before you actually run out of juice, and while I really wish they’d communicate such info by texting my phone or something rather than saying words directly into my ear, I do appreciate the chance to adjust my plans.

The second is that the audio cuts out sometimes. It happens about as often as with my wireless sports ear buds (I use Jbird X2s). It’s super annoying when it happens, but it depends a lot on how far the phone is from the receiver and what’s in the way, so I have some control. If I keep my phone in my back pocket while I’m wearing a backpack that contains a laptop, the audio glitches multiple times a minute. But if I keep my phone in my front shirt pocket, or in my bra, it never glitches.

Hopes For Future Tech

Here are the things I most want to see in my next auditory cybernetic enhancement.

1. Better noise cancellation, obviously, especially for the higher frequencies.
2. Let me turn off spoken announcements from the device, and send the info to my phone as text instead.
3. Sound recognition. I’d like to be able to point at a particular source of sound, like a single person’s voice, and cancel everything besides that. Which is exactly what Orosound’s Tilde ear buds are supposed to do (though using directionality, not actual sound recognition as I’d like), but I just heard about them for the first time today. I’m pretty skeptical and don’t expect them to measure up to the Sony/Bose standard in noise cancellation overall, but if I try them out I’ll add a note here.
4. A completely wireless hearing-aid-like design. These exist, but the tech is young and they’re still pretty glitchy.
5. Precise, highly customizable, speech-focused equalization. Some people’s voices are grating to me, and I hate this because it means I can’t stand bodyspace interactions with certain people I’d otherwise get along with just fine. If I could adjust which frequencies are sent through to my ears, perhaps it would solve this problem. Earbuds with built-in equilizers do exist - Here One looks pretty exciting, plus it’s truly wireless - but so far everything I’ve seen “tunes into speech while tuning out the plane engine”, which doesn’t sound precise enough to control my experience of individual voices.

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[Note: This is my take on a thing I’ve been learning from Max Harms. He’s very good at it, from my perspective. I am not.]

When I savor a wine, I am careful and slow. I attend and adjust, listening intently, as though I’m waiting for a very quiet song over an old radio that I have to tune.

What is the song? It’s never “this wine tastes good” or “this wine tastes bad”. The song was composed by someone else, and they were trying to communicate what they were thinking and feeling as they crafted it. My goals and values are not components of their song.

The song of the wine itself is carried on things like “a tingly peppery spice at the tip of my tongue”. It interacts with my own mind, of course, and when it’s filtered through my memories it might come to me as “the time when Grandpa and I were eating oatmeal raisin cookies while he smoked a pipe”. From that I can extract “oatmeal, raisins, and tobacco”, and hold those perceptions against the other sensations created by the wine, to taste the larger shape of its flavor. I sometimes do free-association while drinking wine, to pick up more subtleties like this.

There are lots of subtleties, lots of sensations going on all at once, and I have to listen closely to hear all the parts. I usually have to listen multiple times.

In early college, when I drank wine for the first time outside of Mass, my experience was very different. I was mainly concerned with whether I could tolerate the taste long enough to get drunk.

I don’t mean to say that it’s better to experience food and drink as art. Sometimes wolfing down the nutrients needed to run my body is exactly the right thing to do.

What I’m pointing at, rather, is that my brain is programmed to efficiently assess whether food is safe to eat, and whether it is calorically rich. Chefs, winemakers, and other culinary artists are doing their own thing, which is almost orthogonal to the goals (so to speak) of biological evolution. So, if I want to know what a carefully crafted food actually tastes like, then I have to do something weird with my mind. I have to be an epicure, which I would not do by default, because it’s not part of a human mind’s factory settings.

This is, of course, a metaphor for rationality in general. But I’m going to apply it a bit more precisely than that.

2.

When I struggle to empathize with someone (which is pretty much every time I try, in my case), the main obstacle is the very same thing that originally prevented me from tasting wine.

By default, I’m only perceiving a few blunt fragments of info about how they relate to my goals and values. Are they smart? Do they signal like my in-group? Are they easy to talk to? Do they enjoy the same things as me? Can I tolerate this wine long enough to get drunk?

And I’m filtering the info so quickly that I’m not even aware it’s happening, unless I’m looking right at the process. The thing that makes it to consciousness and feels like “my perception of the person” actually contains more of my song than theirs. I’ve discarded most of their personhood.

Again, I’m not saying that this is always bad. I need to be able to make quick judgments, sometimes, about whether a person is safe or dangerous, friend or enemy, smart or dumb.

But if I want, for whatever reason, to see them for more of what they are than for what I am, I have to do a weird thing with my mind. I have to be an epicure of personhood, to see them as an artistic experience in the midst of creating itself.

I can’t always do it. It’s hard for me. But when I deliberately choose to try, and then it works, here’s how that happens.

First, I take on a mental posture I call “dreaming”. It’s the one I use for brain storming, fiction writing, and solving lateral thinking puzzles. Its central features are disinhibition and creativity. If you want to know what it feels like, name as many animals as you can in the next minute.

When I name as many animals as I can in the next minute, it starts out feeling sort of panicked, then easy and familiar, and then I feel struggle when I begin to run out of dogs, cats, and elephants. And then, often, something shifts, and things start flowing again. I name animals I haven’t thought about for a long time, like tapirs and rat snakes. I describe animals whose names I can’t remember, like those fish with the transparent heads and you can see their brains. I even begin to name things like venus fly traps, and then I go, “wait, that’s not an animal”. Everything after that shift is “dreaming”.

So I start to dream about the person in front of me, using the bits and pieces of what I know of them (and of people in general). They are a prompt, a seed for association.

I dream about what they might have done that day - taking the train to work, Kindle sitting on their lap as the train lurches and roars; meeting their spouse for lunch and receiving a kiss on the cheek; choosing the green shirt they’re wearing from among the other shirts in their closet. I dream about experiences from earlier times in their life - riding in the back seat of a car, boxes crammed in all around them, as their family moved across the country, or the last conversation they had with their best friend from high school. If I know that being a student is important to them, and that they’ve been struggling with the structure and culture of academia, I might imagine them watching the clock during a dull lecture.

Next, I shift into first person perspective while I continue dreaming about them. At first the shift is just outrospective: the arm rest of the couch is under ”my” arm, and I don’t see my own head or face as I make eye contact with “my” best friend from high school.

But then I focus in on the emotions, especially the ones related to what they want in that situation, and I feed in anything I can infer about their values, aspirations, and talents. What might it be like for this person to visit their hometown after a couple years of college, and hang out with someone they used to be close to but has gone their own way since then?

I might get something like pining, and the feeling of familiar ground being suddenly strange. That would be mixed with curiosity and caring. Maybe a little shame that my caring is more “for old time’s sake” than genuine interest in the person in front of me. I try to see the answers from a first-person emotional perspective, just like like the visuals but fleshed out with introspective sensations as well this time. It feels like filling my own body with their experiences.

Then I change the genre from “semi-biographical Earthfic” to something like “semi-biographical far-future utopion sci-fi/fantasy”. I use those emotion-and-value-laden first person experiences from their past and present, and dream about what they might become, what they might do, what it might feel like to be them, if all their current limitations were eliminated. If they could actually get what they wanted. If they lived in a world optimized for their own flourishing. If, basically, they were a god.

(I often set this a couple centuries out in a world with a slow AI takeoff, instead of a foom-type intelligence explosion. The first thing is a lot easier to imagine in concrete detail, and I’m going for richness over accuracy.)

My father is a high school biology teacher. He also raises animals, and loves nurturing things in general. When I did house chores as a kid, he’d have me cover the mesh ceilings of terrariums with ice so that as it melted, his lizards could drink the rain.

^That time the emu got cold so Dad gave it his sweater.

When I imagine his distant future, sometimes I think of a whole planet with nothing but interesting creatures for him to cultivate and love. He doesn’t spend all his time there, but he at least takes long visits.

I think of him exploring an alien forest and finding a crab that shimmers strangely. (Surprise, interest, curiosity, excitement, examination.) He takes it back to his lab - a giant greenhouse in the middle of the forest, packed with all kinds of sciency gadgets. (Adventure, planning, inquiry, caretaking, diligence.) After lots of investigation, perhaps with the help of younger naturalists he mentors, he understands what causes it to shimmer. Then he begins to manipulate pockets of his planet’s ecosystem so that other creatures can shimmer as well. (Creativity, advancement, satisfaction.)

I call this “tasting godhood”. Or, sometimes, “tasting personhood”. They are the same.

At this point in the process, it becomes hard not to see the person as an artistic process. But even so, I might move back and forth between different periods in their lives: their future as it contains their past, and their past as it contains their future. I feel for the similarities between the experiences of the future god and the experience of the present person. Dad’s experience as he makes a comfortable space for the shimmery crab in his forest greenhouse is similar to his experience when he covers the terrariums in his apartment with ice cubes. One is a human, and the other a god, but they are instances of a single person.

^Dad’s sulcata tortoise has a Tile glued to its shell, so he can be found via bluetooth when he wanders off. One day Darwin dislodged the Tile, and then went on a grand adventure. I found out when Dad made a Facebook post asking all his students and friends to keep an eye out for a seventy pound tortoise roaming the countryside. “His tracker isn't working. I've been searching for hours,” he wrote. “He is very friendly, and loves strawberries.” If it had gone on any longer, I think he’d have printed up dozens of “Have you seen this tortoise???” fliers and scattered them about the little towns near his farm. But Darwin came back, all on his own! And Dad fed him fruit to welcome him home.

The specific experiences I imagine are probably quite different from the ones the person actually has/had/will have, but the point is that I’m perceiving them in a different way. I’m looking for the particular notes in the complex bouquet of their personhood, not deciding whether I can tolerate them long enough to collaborate on a project. Not drinking the wine just to get drunk.

It’s a lot easier to empathize with a person when I’m actually paying attention to them, instead of to how they relate to my goals. This is pretty obvious, in retrospect. But unless I do the weird epicurean thing, “how they relate to my goals” just is what “perceiving another person” feels like, even when I’m deliberately focusing on them. And when I’m not deliberately focusing on them, perceiving another person tends to feel like walking past furniture.

Undoubtedly, that’s partially because I’m missing important social software that comes pre-installed for most people. Still, much of what I know about how human minds work suggests that even neurotypicals spend most of their time a lot closer to the “wine is good or bad” side of social perception than the “oatmeal cookies and grandpa’s pipe” side. At the very least, they lack control over their position on that spectrum.

But there’s another way this practice might be used even when empathy is very easy for you: Tasting godhood doesn’t have to be directed at someone else. You are a person as well.

3.

I often look for my own godhood by this method. I go through exactly the same procedure - dreaming about specific experiences, imagining the present, imagining the past, speculating about the future - using myself as a prompt. In some ways it’s easier, because I can draw on memories rather than just imaginings.

Why would I do this, if I already know exactly what it’s like to be me? Well in fact I’m often not aware of what it’s like to be “me”, in the sense of being a complex pattern of values and experiences and decisions, distributed across time. It’s easy to focus in on the pieces of the pattern that are surfacing in the current moment, forgetting that there are many other ways I have been or might become.

And it’s easy to tell a simple story about myself that’s really just a few blunt fragments of info involving whatever happens to be on my mind at the moment. So it’s especially useful to spend some time tasting my godhood when I’m judging myself harshly, when I’m only able to see myself in terms of simple hateful judgments like “I am broken” or “I am stupid and lazy”.

I think this method is an especially good way into self-compassion at those times. When I’ve tried to find self compassion by other methods, the main sticking point has been that they work by denying or at least distracting me from accurate perceptions of weakness or whatever. Telling my shame to just shove it almost never works.

When I taste my godhood, though, I see the truth of those judgements in context. I see the way my struggles result from conflicts between what I most deeply value and the constraints of a broken world. And this happens as a side effect of seeing myself Originally, even if I’m just trying to “remember myself”, as opposed to processing shame in particular.

I don’t feel hatred toward an oak seedling for not being a hundred feet tall, especially when it’s growing in a desert. Even though it’s small and fragile. (Of course it’s small. Of course it’s fragile.) Instead, I feel love and awe, because I can see what it’s trying to become. I want to give it water so it can reach up into the sky. When I see myself Originally, I perceive myself as a god seed just beginning to sprout.

Tasting the personhood of anyone feels this way. A person is a god. Everything else is mere humanity.

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The second virtue is relinquishment. P. C. Hodgell said: “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be.” Do not flinch from experiences that might destroy your beliefs. The thought you cannot think controls you more than thoughts you speak aloud. Submit yourself to ordeals and test yourself in fire. Relinquish the emotion which rests upon a mistaken belief, and seek to feel fully that emotion which fits the facts. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is hot, and it is cool, the Way opposes your fear. If the iron approaches your face, and you believe it is cool, and it is hot, the Way opposes your calm. Evaluate your beliefs first and then arrive at your emotions. Let yourself say: “If the iron is hot, I desire to believe it is hot, and if it is cool, I desire to believe it is cool.” Beware lest you become attached to beliefs you may not want.

1

I consider loving-kindness meditation to be a central example of a “cultivation” exercise. If you’re one of the people it fits well and you do it regularly for a long time, it nudges your dominant cognitive patterns into a more compassionate shape. Eventually, you become a more compassionate person, overall.

Some more examples: Shikantaza, and other meditations that go straight for enlightenment, might also be cultivation meditations. If you do daily gratitude journaling, that’s probably a cultivation for gratitude (or some related capacity). Runners who train at slightly greater distances every week cultivate endurance.

Gendlin’s Focusing, by contrast, is not primarily a cultivation.

In exploring the craft of meditation design, one thing I’d like to learn is how to cultivate arbitrary virtues using nothing but my own mind. So I set out to build a meditation that cultivates epistemic relinquishment. And here it is.

2

It borrows the structure of loving-kindness meditation, but has nothing to do with compassion. To start, you’ll need to tailor the building blocks so they each fit you snugly and don’t chafe. Then I’ll explain how to put them together, and at the end, I’ll suggest variations.

Stuff you’ll need (I’ll discuss each of these in detail):

• a fixation point
• a reference experience
• a mantra
• a belief it would be very easy to let go of, in the face of counter-evidence
• a belief it would be a little hard to let go of, in the face of counter-evidence
• (eventually) a belief it would be very difficult to let go of, in the face of counter-evidence
• some circumstances that would be counter-evidence against each belief

Fixation

A fixation point is an external target onto which you can rest all of your attention. The goal is to gather up as many cognitive resources as possible in preparation for the meditation. Some examples include

• the sound of your breath
• the visual details of a dime-sized spot on the wall
• the feeling of your feet touching the ground

The “external” part is important. When you look at a spot on the wall, you can be sure the spot will stay put. If you instead focused on “what you’re feeling right now”, you’d have a moving target. Choose something that will stay put without any effort on your part, so you’re free to devote your whole mind to mere observation.

A note on neuroatypical attention: I expect that fixation may be a wrong move for a lot of people, especially some with ADD. If fixation sounds terribly unpleasant, you should probably skip it. Do whatever will help you engage with the rest of the meditation.

A Reference Experience

During this meditation, you’ll be moving into a mental state where it would be easy to let go of a belief that carries extreme personal significance. What would such a mental state feel like?

You might not get this right, at first, and that’s ok. But try to take a guess. You can call on memories of changing your mind, or imagined experiences from fiction or other people’s lives. Think of a time when you held or even defended a belief fiercely, but then something changed so it became possible fto update easily. That is the kind of state you’re looking for.

In my case, the relevant feeling is a kind of freedom, relaxation, and relief. It’s a letting go, a recognition that I’m not responsible for holding reality by force of will. It’s a relief to feel that all I have to do right now is learn what is true, and a reassurance that I’ll be positioned to respond with greater strength once I’ve done that.

A Mantra

For some people, words will just get in the way. If you think you’re one of those, skip this part. But if you’re not sure, give it a try.

Look for a word, phrase, or series of phrases that can be a System 1 handle for your reference experience. You can adopt someone else’s words, or you can compose your own. To me, using the right mantra feels like speaking the True Name of relinquishment.

My general method of finding mantras is this: I imagine a far-future version of myself who lives in Utopia, is vastly more wise and competent than I am right now, and who remembers exactly what it was like to be me. I imagine them coming to me in a moment where I need to make a specific mental motion, as though they’ve traveled back in time to intervene at a key point in my development. Then I imagine the words they speak to me to guide me through the motion.

When I do this for relinquishment, I get, “First know what is true. Work out what to do about it later.” Those words are my mantra.

Some Beliefs For Visualization

The meditation itself consists of a series of visualizations. For the first visualization, you’ll need a belief with no personal significance.

For example, I currently believe that the pencil I tossed in my book bag this morning is yellow. I’m pretty confident of that, but when I imagine reaching into my bag to find that it’s actually pink, it’s no big deal. I feel no hesitation about observing the pencil, no fear or shame or despair, no feeling that things I care about rest on the color of the pencil. I don’t feel betrayed by reality. I just imagine a brief moment of surprise and mild confusion, followed by a guess at why I was wrong, and then an effortless update. All it takes for me to change my belief from “yellow” to “pink” is picking up the pencil and observing its color.

For the second, you’ll need a belief with moderate personal significance, something you care a little about. You could try completing some of these sentences: * I think that , and would be a little unhappy if it turned out that _. * I think that , and it would be uncomfortable to learn that . * I think , and I hope it’s false that . * I feel mild dread at the idea that __.

A good example of this for me is, “I feel mild dread at the idea that I filed the legal documents incorrectly.” It wouldn’t be huge, just annoying because bureaucracy sucks.

You can keep going with this series, finding beliefs that are increasingly dear to you. But I recommend starting with just these two, to get the hang of the meditation itself before adding more difficult content.

Imaginary Counter-Evidence

For each belief, come up with at least one observation you would count as counter-evidence. For “the pencil is yellow”, counter-evidence could be “when I take the pencil from my bag, it looks pink”. For “I filed the legal documents correctly”, counter-evidence could be “I got a letter from the County Clerk saying I did something wrong”, or “I didn’t hear back from the Clerk when I expected to”. It doesn’t have to be decisive, as long as it would cause some part of you to feel that you should update.

For more personally significant beliefs, look for imaginary counter-evidence in the direction of hesitation or fear. Look for regions of thought-space you would prefer to avoid while holding the belief in mind. Look for the thoughts that hurt.

With filing legal documents, I looked in the directions of “something about paperwork that is already in the mail and out of my control”, “something about red ink”, and “something about judges”. Navigating by the experience of avoidance is key to this exercise.

A Word Of Caution

Bear in mind that relinquishment is not the same as updating away from a belief.

Relinquishment is the mental motion that allows you to update away from a belief that you’ve been clinging to stubbornly. A simple Bayes net can update a belief. It takes a far twistier mind, one with a strange human-like relationship to epistemics, to relinquish one. It is possible to relinquish without updating, and in fact part of the goal here is to divorce those two motions.

The virtue cultivated by this meditation is the freedom to change your map when you notice a discrepancy with the territory. But it can go the other way: If clinging and belief are still tightly bound in your mind, then relaxing your grasp may directly cause an update. That would be like changing your map when it already matches the territory.

So when you do begin to progress to more fraught visualizations, I caution against choosing beliefs that are doing a lot of practical work in your life, at least until you have the hang of the associated mental motions. There is some danger here of actually updating away from beliefs you have no reason to think are false. If you notice your betting odds changing drastically during this meditation, back up and work with an easier visualization.

With that, you now have all the parts you need to put this meditation together.

3

Relinquishment Cultivation

1. Perform your fixation (breathing, or whatever). Wait until you feel clear and free of distraction.
2. Play through your first visualization, in vivid detail if possible. In my example, this would mean closing my eyes to imagine reaching into my backpack, searching for a pencil. Then I find the pencil, take it out, and am met with counter-evidence: it seems to be a different color than I expected.
3. Pay attention to your subtle psychological responses this whole time. First notice what it’s like to expose yourself to the possibility of counter-evidence. Then notice what it’s like to receive it. Seek your reference experience, or the opportunity to create it, in those responses. In my visualization, the pencil I’m looking at is most certainly pink. There’s an unconcerned openness between me and that fact. Learning I was wrong, I completely submitted to alignment with reality, with no wasted motion. That’s the easy freedom that I’m looking for.
4. When you find it, focus your attention there, as you did earlier with your fixation object, drinking it in. Then, when the feeling of relinquishment is steady and precise, recite your mantra, either aloud or silently. For me: “First know what is true. Work out what to do about it later.” Repeat it a few times, if you like. Feel it in the context of the visualization. Let its meaning wash over you.
5. When you’re ready, move on to your next visualization.
6. At the end of your final visualization, let go of the details. Spend some time basking in the abstract experience of relinquishment. That’s the goal of this exercise: to make pure relinquishment familiar and comfortable. Rest there until you feel satisfied.

4

Some Variations

The version of this meditation I just described is for routine cultivation. It uses beliefs whose truth values you have no reason to doubt, just to get you familiar with holding them loosely. It’s meant to be done regularly, at the point in your routine when it’s time to meditate.

But a slight adjustment makes it good for acute relinquishment as well. It can be part of a trigger-action plan: “If I notice myself clinging to a belief, I will do a relinquishment meditation, using the belief in question for the second [or third] visualization.” If you’ve done the cultivation version many times, you can probably skip the fixation and even the other visualizations, and move straight into relinquishing the belief.

If you can identify the experiences and mental motions that most often obstruct relinquishment, you can make this meditation the second half of a reflex re-training meditation. I’ll talk about reflex re-training meditations later in this series, but I’ve probably hit on most of it already while writing about how to build cognitive trigger-action plans.

You can also adapt this for cultivation of lightness or evenness, since they’re really just different guises of the same capacity.

With lightness, for instance, I’d do variations on the theme of each visualization. I’d imagine the pencil being pink, then green, then purple. I’d imagine it being a pen instead of a pencil. I’d imagine it being absent all together. I’d imagine seeing that it’s pink, then realizing I’m in unusual lighting and it’s actually yellow after all. I’d look for the feeling of dexterity, rather than the feeling of letting go. I’d say to myself, “I follow where reality leads.”

Finally, this meditation could be used in a Crisis Of Faith.

5

I’d like to close by inviting you to repair this meditation.

The thesis of my first post on meditation design was that different minds benefit from different meditations, and it is worthwhile to find or even create the ones that serve you best given your circumstances.

There is a larger thesis for this whole line of thought and research: If you are interested in systematic personal growth, you should learn how to wield your own mind.

Yes, you should also learn to mine external resources. You should be intellectually gluttonous, because there’s a lot to learn from others, out in the rest of the world. “The eleventh virtue is scholarship.”

But you should also be prepared to face down important problems that have never been identified, let alone solved. One point of disagreement I seem to have with a lot of my community is that such problems are commonplace. It’s not immodest or arrogant to suspect that you’ve found one. One reason for this is that you are the only person who has ever been you, who has ever experienced the intersection of your circumstances and values. When you walk from where you are to where you want to be, you will encounter problems that nobody but you is likely to solve.

And when you do — when you find yourself in a place that lacks roadsigns, or any trail at all to follow — do not wait to be rescued. You may have followed someone else’s directions, and ended up in a place they never imagined could exist. Part of the territory is your mind, you can’t avoid walking through that region, and nobody’s been there but you.

What do you do when nothing you know is enough? When you don’t expect to find an answer outside of yourself no matter how hard you look? When your parents have failed you, your gods are dead, and your tools have shattered in your hand? This is the question that drives me, when I think about meditation.

So if you try the relinquishment cultivation I’ve outlined, it won’t work. Not exactly as I hope. It won’t take you to the same place it takes me, because I’ve never walked through your mind. Don’t wait for someone else to come along and fix it. Ask yourself, “What went wrong? Why exactly did that happen? What could I try instead?”

Out of these broken pieces I’ve offered you, please build something that is new, and whole, and yours.

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i keep a list of “curiosities”. my curiosities list contains stuff that at some point made me go, “huh, that’s interesting. i wonder…” but then i realized it wasn’t worth interrupting what i was doing. every now and then, i go through the list and do a bunch of googling. this time i took notes.

why do goats have weird eyes? their main survival strategy is "when there are predators, run away", so they they need to see far in front of them and behind them, without being blinded by the sun overhead. the horizontal pupils give them 280 degree horizontal vision. goat eyes [even rotate](https://youtu.be/RG894fyXwDQ?t=127) to stay parallel to the ground when they bend to eat.

why are they called "Mormons"? the prophet who compiled scriptures from ancient America was called “Mormon”, and the book he made is called “the book of Mormon”.

what are “forty-niners”? they’re prospectors who went to California in the gold rush of 1849.

Petra? i heard in an episode of Writing Excuses that there have been two major cities in the history of ever that were founded in the middle of a desert, while it was a desert, and managed to flourish. one is Las Vagas, which managed because of the Hoover Dam. the other is Petra. so far i haven’t had any luck fact-checking that claim, but Petra is in fact very neat nonetheless. it was established in the early 300s BCE in Southern Jordan. there were two main things going for it: one, it was at the crossroads of two major trading routes. second, its citizens developed high-tech water collection methods. also, they were awesome at carving stuff into solid stone, like houses and canals and shit, and the rocks in the area are all rosy red. John William Burgon wrote a poem about the city, with an excellent last line, and it goes like this:

It seems no work of Man's creative hand, by labour wrought as wavering fancy planned; But from the rock as if by magic grown, eternal, silent, beautiful, alone! Not virgin-white like that old Doric shrine, where erst Athena held her rites divine; Not saintly-grey, like many a minster fane, that crowns the hill and consecrates the plain; But rose-red as if the blush of dawn, that first beheld them were not yet withdrawn; The hues of youth upon a brow of woe, which Man deemed old two thousand years ago, Match me such marvel save in Eastern clime, a rose-red city half as old as time.

why doesn’t China do team sports? this seems pretty odd to me, given that 1) China is enormous, so after sifting through all those people to find the best athletes there must be some damn good athletes, and 2) my impression of East Asian culture generally is that it’s super into something like team spirit. in short, i still have almost no idea. but here are some things various internet people have proposed that may be worth considering.

• people in China freak out over competitive academics instead of competitive sports.
• they’re a lot more locally focused so the athletes spend most of their sports time doing intramural stuff rather than rising through every-more-global ranks.
• the government doesn’t have its shit together in relevant ways so the society lacks necessary infrastructure for well-organized national sports. (except they’re boss at table tennis so??? maybe it’s substantially easier to organize pairs than teams.)
• they value grit and brains over physical strength, so when people do sports they go for the stuff that relies on loads of training and strategy. however, when i look at the competitions China tends to win in the Olympics, “solo activities” describes the list better than “brains over brawn”: table tennis, badmitton, gymnastics, diving, [weight lifting?], shooting, swimming, fencing, archery, boxing, cycling.
• this isn’t an explanation, just a complication: their women’s teams seem to do fine in the olympics. the women are good at basketball, volleyball and soccer. bwa?
• something something athletically gifted kids are taken from their homes and rigorously trained to mechanical excellence, and the ones who aren’t good enough are just thrown out of the system to fend for themselves with no skills but their athletic training. your survival depends on your own athletic ability, so the family-like team coordination stuff isn’t nurtured. (this doesn’t explain women’s volleyball.)
• i don’t know. i’m still really confused. would love for some of my China-familiar friends to speculate.

Iroquois farming methods? the Iroquois cultivated their main crops by the “three sisters method”. they used raised beds with fish and eels buried for fertilizer, then they’d plant corn, squash, and beans right beside each other in the same plot. the corn stalks work as a trellises for the beans, so there’s no need for poles. the beans provide nitrogen for the corn and squash. the broad leaves of ground-creeping squash vines prevent weeds. nice design! i think i may give this a shot in my garden next year.

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1.

There are two kinds of people: People who meditate a lot, and people who feel guilty that they don’t meditate.

(There are in fact many more kinds of people than this, but these are certainly two of the kinds of people that there are.)

The people who meditate a lot tend to do it thusly: They’ll hear some good things about meditation, go off to a mindfulness retreat or read a book on zazen, and take up a regular practice of whatever sort of meditation they learned about. Then they’ll just keep doing it, in about the same way, indefinitely.

The second type of person will start such a practice, find that it’s not working out, and then feel vaguely guilty forever because they aren’t one of the cool people who meditates.

I’ve been each of these myself, at some point or another. And from my current perspective, both relationships with meditation seem dysfunctional. Neither one resembles how I behave, or what I feel, when I Actually Try to do something (besides maybe follow instructions).

Now, I’m not saying you shouldn’t meditate.

What I’m saying is, maybe the forms of meditation that were designed by other people for the purpose of achieving parinirvana, or migration to the Pure Land, or communion with God, are not the best possible forms of meditation for you to be doing.

Maybe they’re not even very good, for you in particular. Even if they lower your blood pressure. Even if you sometimes feel better after you do them. Maybe the value of a meditation depends on your particular goals and cognitive style, so that it’s almost impossible for anybody besides you to find the perfect fit for your situation.

We are not broken. Meditation is.

(Well ok maybe we are broken; this just isn’t much evidence one way or another.)

But maybe, we can fix it.

2.

I don’t have a general-purpose procedure for designing meditations (yet). But I do have a firm enough grasp on the thought-style to design meditations for myself at this point. I hope I can at least gesture at what I’m doing.

I’ll start with three foundational principles:

• Your meditations are yours. Other people’s meditations might be good for inspiration and guidance, but you’re the only one inside your mind. You have your own problems, your own goals, your own strengths, and your own weaknesses. You should therefore have your own meditations.
• You are allowed to have goals. Some meditations shun them, but yours doesn't have to. You are also allowed to stuff your mind full of whatever you want. You are allowed to be attached to things. Perhaps you will be best served by clinging tightly to the goal of following as many thoughts as possible in twenty minutes. Or maybe for you, that would be bad, but you mustn’t take it for granted. It is your mind, you make the rules.
• There is no One True Meditation. The perfect rain dance cannot clear the clouds. It’s not just that different people need different dances for summoning rain; the same person might need rain one day day, and sun the next. No single cognitive dance can accomplish every goal. Equip yourself with many meditations.

3.

Ok, enough prep. Time for the nitty gritties. Here is how I designed an orientation meditation for myself a couple weeks ago.

I started with a familiar imagined experience that indicates a problem.

Problem: I have a trapped feeling of un-directed futility, like I don’t know why I’m doing what I’m doing, what I might do instead, or what difference it would make.

Then, I used it to identify a goal. To find the goal, I asked myself, “How would I experience the world where my problem has been solved?” If my problem were solved,…

Goal: I’d feel a sense of perspective, clarity, and decisiveness. It would be as though I could see my life from above, like a rat armed with a satellite image of its maze. I’d understand how my present experiences and next actions relate to my large-scale strategy. I’d feel determination and equanimity.

So I wanted to design a meditation that moves me from a state of disorientation to a state of clarity. I began to brainstorm paths from the first state to the second, but then I backed up and tried brainstorming approaches to finding that path instead.

Possible Approaches

• Go straight for a solution as though whatever plan I have after five minutes is the one I’ll use forever.
• Imagine in concrete detail an experience of being trapped and disoriented in a tiny perspective. Imagine that ten minutes later, I’m no longer trapped and disoriented, but rather free, clear, calm, and determined. In between, I do something. What exactly do I do?
• Ask a friend who seems to be good at finding direction and clarity what they do to be like that. Ask a friend who seems to struggle a lot with being trapped in a tiny perspective how they deal with it. Ask Facebook. Ask Google.
• Again, imagine the experience of being trapped and disoriented. How did I end up that way? See if my list of causes suggests obvious solutions.
• Can I remember times when I went from feeling trapped and disoriented to feeling free and clear? What happened in my mind? Can I deliberately reproduce some of that?

Then I picked my favorite approach, and took a shot at using it. I went with the second one: “Imagine being disoriented. Ten minutes later, I’m oriented. What happened?

From here, things got a bit messier. I’m not clear on how I did the rest, except that I took many components from other meditations or techniques I’ve used before.

But here is what I actually came up with in response to the prompt.

Meditation For Clarity

Step 0: Advocation. I notice that I’m in a bad spot, and that I need to take care of myself. I summon the will to do that by the same method I usually use: I recite Invictus. My new attention to self-care alerts me that I need to find clarity and direction, and should therefore move into my clarity meditation.

Step 1: Presence. I become very aware of my current context. I say exactly where I am, what I’m doing right now, and what I’m feeling. For example, “It’s May 2017. I’m at my house in Berkeley. I’m sitting on the couch scouring the internet for the perfect teapot. I feel frustrated, disoriented, and drifty. I feel like I’m wasting time, but I don’t know what to do with it instead.”

Step 2: Self Compassion. I bring attention to (the very general reason) why I’m feeling trapped and disoriented. I do this with the guidance of my past self, who has designed and stored for me a mantra. They’ve composed the words, and my only job is to sink into the large, self-compassionate perspective they point toward. It goes something like this: “I am only an egg. My mind is too small to support the me I yearn to be. I am ambitious, but limited, and can only see a little at a time.”

Step 3: Maximum Zoomout. Then I remind myself of my largest-scale goal and my largest-scale strategy. These words are also pre-scripted by a past self, and I try to sink into their meaning. “I want humanity to survive and flourish. I will mitigate global catastrophic risk by accelerating AI alignment research.”

Step 4: Transition. I begin the second half of the meditation with a question: “By what means am I moving forward?” The problem I’m addressing involves being stuck, so rather than answering by stating my local strategy as something static (”I’m supporting AI alignment research by [various means]”), I want to focus on motion. I search specifically for deliberate growth, creation, and change. “I am moving through my life toward a goal,” I think. “By what means am I gaining speed, accuracy, and precision?”

Step 5: Declaration of Motion. This part is a little different each time, since my focus changes month to month, week to week, even day to day. But by this point in the meditation, I’ve arrived at a mental space where I have enough vision to answer the question on my own.

Were I to do this right now, I would say, “I am leveraging my strengths, accommodating my weaknesses, and increasing stability. I am learning to use social support, establishing routines that promote comfort and concentration, and seeking more sustainable dynamics with the people I love.”

Step 6: Orientation. Finally, I look over my opportunities for the rest of the day. “From my current position,” I ask myself, “how can I move in the ways I’ve just described? What actions are available, and which tiny tactics advance my strategy?” I choose at least one next action, and resolve to take it.

Over the past two weeks, I’ve used the full version of this meditation about three times. The full version is most helpful when I notice that “something is wrong”, and the wrong thing turns out to be “I feel directionless and disoriented”. But an abbreviated version is part of my routine now, and I use it for daily planning either first thing in the morning or late at night.

4.

The bits I feel confident about end there, at least for now. But just for fun, let’s dip our toes into some theory. I’ll talk a about what I think meditation is for, and when it might be a good idea to meditate. From that I’ll extract a (tentative) taxonomy of meditations, which I intend as a jumping-off point for others.

I hope you’ll concede that meditation is at least helpful for some people sometimes. But even then, going straight for meditation can be wrong. Maybe you can re-gather concentration by doing a concentration-gathering meditation; but it might be more efficient, or at least better for you in the long run, to try eating a snack first.

From my perspective, it looks like the best reason to take a few skill points in meditation is that eating a snack doesn’t always work. Sometimes there’s just no ready-made hack at my disposal that will do the trick, and for all I know the tool I need doesn’t even exist yet. At these times, meditation is a way to sit down with myself, look myself straight in the mind, and say, “Ok, self, it’s all up to us. Let’s do this.”

Meditation is for problems that can be solved just by changing what your mind is doing. It’s not so good for problems that are best solved in dialog with the environment. It would be silly to meditate on opening a jar of peanut butter, if your goal is to thereby open the jar of peanut butter. (Young me spent a lot of time trying this, in fact. Doesn’t work.)

But if your problem is that you want to re-produce an experience of heightened awareness you once had after studying for a long time, or that you spiral into a pit of shame whenever you feel jealousy, or that you want to be more honest and epistemically humble, or that you want to grok every implication of the lecture on supervised k-means you just heard, then meditation may be in order.

In other words, a few things meditation can help with are

1. deliberately moving from one mental sate to another,
2. re-training cognitive reflexes,
3. cultivating capacities and dispositions,
4. gaining awareness of your own cognitive patterns, and
5. deeply integrating information you already have.

The orientation meditation I showed you is of the first type: deliberately moving from one mental state to another. These five classes of problem probably require distinct classes of meditation; that was just one.

For instance, mettā (or loving-kindness meditation) is type 3: cultivating capacities and dispositions. It’s often practiced like prayer, as though thinking nice thoughts about someone will make nice things happen to them; but what it actually does is cultivate compassion in the person who uses it.

I recommend finding a meditation of each type that works for you at least some of the time, whether you make it from scratch or borrow from somebody else. That way, when you run into a problem that could benefit from meditation, you’ll have a source of inspiration and guidance that resembles the meditation you need.

But I’d hate for this rough taxonomy to tie you down, just like I hope you’re no longer bound by meditations you’ve already tried. I’ll be extra happy if this post spins off better theories and systems, and not just a few new personal meditations.

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P.S. A couple posts ago, I announced my Patreon. I want to mention that it seems to be working! I am now blogging almost every morning. I currently have five new posts in the works, at least two of which I expect to actually publish. I’ve also noticed more of my attention throughout the day going to technique design-, blog-, and teaching-related thoughts. Thank you so much to everybody who’s been pitching in! I think there’s a lot more room yet for additional funding, and I confidently predict that if you pitch in a little financial support per post, you will cause me to be more generative and to get more of what I make into publishable shape. If that sounds like a good deal to you, click on the Patreon button in the top right to learn more.

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you might like to read this if: you're into positive psychology, you're interested in ways to be more creative, you want to know what i've been up to recently

at the suggestion of 80,000 Hours, i was looking into signature strengths.

“signature strengths” are a positive psychology thing; they're supposed to be “character strengths that are most essential to who we are”. i think of them as “the virtues that matter most to me”. 80k says you should exercise at least one of your top five signature strengths every day.

i think "one strength a day" sounds inadequate. after reading and thinking about signature strengths, here’s what i feel i should be doing.

1. install a collection of signature-strength-boosting trigger-action plans and changes to routine that (collectively) fire multiple times a day.
2. identify and remove chronic barriers to exercising my signature strengths.
3. deeply indulge (>1hr) in each of my top five signature strengths at least once a week.

the first one seemed shiny, so i got straight to work.

according to the VIA survey linked in the 80k article, my top signature strength is creativity (which they define as “thinking of novel and productive ways to conceptualize and do things”). i looked through the VIA list of ways to use creativity, and i was… a bit disappointed. so i made my own.

here are some TAPs that i hope will help me take better advantage of my creativity.

• if i notice the sensation of stopping at an obvious answer, i’ll think of at least one more possible answer.
• if i have a thought that feels interesting in response to something i’ve read, i’ll write a less-than-twenty-word version of it in my notebook beside a little picture of a lightbulb.
• if i’m doing a creative thing, it’s about time to stop, and i don’t want to stop because it’s going so well, i’ll write down the next action for next time and stop anyway. (this is about giving my future self something to sink their teeth into, not about time/attention management.)
• if i’m about to research something, i’ll propose at least one possible answer first, or generate a possible example of the thing.
• if i feel stuck, attached, bored, robotic, like i don’t know where to start, like i’m spinning my wheels, or like i want to map a section of concept space, i’ll consider making a brainstormy list. (this is actually seven TAPs.)
• if i’m annoyed by a small but recurring problem, i’ll write it down. (this one’s relevance will become clear shortly.)
• if i’m making a list of possible solutions to a problem, i’ll consider making a list of possible approaches to solving the problem instead (unless i’ve already done so).
• if i feel like i’m running out of ideas while brainstorming, i’ll try associating with pairwise combinations of the items i’ve already generated.
• if i feel blank, i'll impose an arbitrary constraint. ("only things that remind me of the color blue.")
• if i find myself getting very interested in a new topic, i’ll try making a map of relevant concept space to guide my investigations.

and here are a few changes to regular routine (that is, TAPs whose triggers are temporal):

• at regular intervals (probably once or twice a week), pick one of my small but annoying problems and spend five minutes trying to solve it.
• at regular intervals (probably once a week), pick something i do frequently. make a map of variations on ways to do the thing.
• engage with one of my deliberately creative projects (such as writing) for one to five minutes every morning. (this is an attempt at productive procrastination; i’m trying to give myself a chance to think about my work while i do other things.)

my next step is to identify chronic barriers to exercising creativity.

my other signature strengths are judgement, curiosity, love of learning, and appreciation of beauty and excellence. i doubt i’ll do a whole series on this, but if there’s a particular part you’re interested in, let me know, and i’ll see about turning my experience of it into a followup post.

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you might like to read this if: you struggle to know what you’re feeling, you want to get better at knowing what you’re feeling, you’re curious about what i’ve been up to for the past year

i am bad at emotional awareness. over the past year, i’ve gotten much better. here are some things that have helped.

1. instead of asking myself “how do i feel?”, i ask myself “what do i feel?”. when i hear “how do you feel?”, i tend to indicate some point on a linear spectrum from “good” to “bad”. it’s like, “how do you like ice cream?” “oh, i love ice cream!”. i might end up answering “pretty good”. not a lot of info.

   but when i hear “what do you feel?”, it’s more like “what ice cream do you like?”. answering it feels like strolling along beside the counter at Baskin-Robbins, sampling flavors to decide what to buy. “rocky road? orange sherbert? ooo, triple chocolate fudge, yes that.” “what do i feel” might get me an answer like “frustrated, excited, happy, anxious, and annoyed”. for most contexts where my emotions matter, that’s way more valuable than “pretty good”.

2. i spent a week practicing “emotional inventory”. i set an alarm for every two hours between 8:00 and 10:00. on the first day, whenever it was inventory time, i wrote down at least one thing i was feeling. on the second day, i wrote down two things. after that, i wrote down at least three things each time. (it might be possible to feel fewer than three emotions, but i’ve never run into that so far.)

   it was really hard at first, and it took forever. i remember timing myself, and finding that it took fifteen minutes to report five emotions, some of which were clearly caused by the search process itself.

   but it’s gotten way easier over time. my current inventory is [sleepy, eager, happy, relieved, focused, distracted, calm, hopeful, engaged], and that took me about thirty seconds.

3. i guess. sometimes when i ask myself “what do i feel?” the only answer i get is “i have no idea”. so i start naming emotions randomly, and checking whether i feel them. “am i happy? maybe. am i angry? no. am i tired? yes, super tired.” early on, i kept a list of emotion words in my pocket (well, on my phone) so i could just go through them and pick out the ones that felt relevant.

4. i consider emotional quadrants. if i assume emotions can be graphed as measures of arousal and valence, then i can find the rough location of what i’m feeling by checking whether it’s more like happy, sad, excited, or scared.

   the downside of this is that it points me to a single answer, as though i’m only experiencing one emotion at a time, which i never am. but usually it helps me get my bearings by nudging introspection toward emotional identification.

5. i look for more than one thing. if i assume that i’m only feeling one emotion at a time, i’m super confused, trying to infer a single coherent shape from a collection of apparently unrelated sensations. if i seem to be feeling multiple things, then i probably am.

6. contrasting emotions can happen simultaneously. “sad” and “happy” are not mutually exclusive in the space of a human mind. emotions are independent, like “sweet” and “bitter”.

   this is an update, not a technique, but i’ve had to remind myself of it often. when i add sugar to my coffee, i get a drink that’s both sweet and bitter. there’s nothing weird about that, even though “sweet” and “bitter” seem kind of like opposite ends of a single spectrum. emotions are like that. i’m frequently happy and sad at the same time.

7. i progress from easy introspection to difficult introspection. being reflectively aware of emotions is a lot harder for me than being reflectively aware of most other things. it’s easier for me to know what i’m thinking about, or what my body is doing, or what i’m hearing.

   so i have a little meditation i go through sometimes, which feels like gaining control of my mind’s eye, and then turning it inward. first, i name something i see, something i hear, and something i feel with touch: blue shoes, the sound of rain, the texture of my socks. then i name three things i feel in my body: itchy arm, chest moving as i breathe, back muscles holding me upright. then i start asking myself what my emotions are. it’s sort of a warm-up, and seems to help.

8. i look to my body for hints. emotions are often correlated with specific bodily sensations or movements. if my throat is tight, for example, it’s strong evidence that i’m either sad or afraid. so if i do a body scan and find that my throat is tight, i know to ask myself “am i sad?” and “am i scared?”. if i find that my knee is bouncing, then i might be restless, eager, or anxious. if i find a headache and painfully tight shoulder and neck muscles, i’m probably stressed.

there are also subtler things it took me longer to learn, things that somehow feel part-way between “physiological correlate” and “subjective emotional component”. i think this is what people are usually talking about when they say “what does it feel like in your body?”.

for example, joy and excitement are so strongly associated with a kinesthetic sensation of upward motion in my torso that the perceived movement feels like part of the emotion. it’s such a close tie that learning to recognize the motion as a sensation in itself took some work. but now that i can do it, it’s sometimes easier to spot that upward-motion sensation before i’ve identified feelings of “joy” or “excitement”.

9. i learned about writing fictional characters. one of the most common pieces of (good!) writing advice in fiction is “show, don’t tell”. in general, it’s a suggestion to move away from “abstract” and toward “concrete”. but a central instance is communicating a character’s emotions to the reader.

   i could “tell” you that John was feeling scared. or, i could show his knuckles going white as he grips the flashlight like a talisman, his breath coming in ragged gasps that the intruder can surely hear through the closet door, a ball of ice in the pit of his stomach that freezes his limbs in place, obsessive visualizations of faceless monsters playing on repeat through his mind, the disorganization of his thoughts as he struggles to form a plan of attack, or time seeming to stretch so far it might shatter.

   setting aside the details of how, when, and why to use this sort of thing in writing, it’s clearly worth storing in my writing toolbox. but how can i actually do it? how can i show the reader my character’s fear if i don’t recognize signs of fear myself?

   it helped to study depictions of emotion in other people’s fiction. it also helped to study the whole of my experience carefully when i noticed i was feeling an especially strong emotion.

   but most of all, it helped to find a wonderful book by Angela Ackerman and Becca Puglisi called The Emotion Thesaurus: A Writer’s Guide To Character Expression.

   The Emotion Thesaurus is just a long list of emotions - “adoration”, “agitation”, and “amazement”, through “unease”, “wariness”, and “worry” - with several ways of depicting each. the longest sublist, usually taking up a whole page, is “physical signals”. on the opposite page are lists of “internal sensations”, “mental responses”, “cues of acute or long-term [emotion]”, and “cues of suppressed [emotion]”. for example,“disappointment”’s “physical signals” list has thirty-nine items, and begins with “lowering one’s head”, “lips pressing tight”, and “shoulders dropping or slumping”.

   referring to these lists as i wrote was super handy not just for writing, but for building associations between emotions and other parts of my experience. but i do think the “actually trying to write characters” part was essential. this wouldn’t have worked if i’d just read the book.

10. i learned how to to figure out what i want. i will talk at greater length about this one in a separate post, but briefly: it is useful to suppose that for every emotion, there is a corresponding desire, and for every desire, a corresponding emotion. if i find myself wanting to sprint up a mountainside, for example, there’s a very good chance that i’m feeling restless.

    if i happen to have an easier time identifying my desires, which sometimes i do, i can use them as a map to my emotions.

11. i made trigger-action plans. it would do little good to learn emotional awareness techniques if i never used them. although i have, at this point, developed a nearly constant, low-level awareness of my emotional state, there are still times when it’s especially important i snap my attention to what i’m feeling.

    the most obvious triggers for emotional awareness are things like “someone asks me how i feel about something”, or “i’m trying to do a CFAR exercise that requires i know how i feel”. turns out creating TAPs for these was actually necessary, since i otherwise go back to abstractly inferring the answer from a deliberate model of myself, or whatever it is that happens when i don’t actually check.

    but the most important trigger for emotional awareness is “something’s wrong”.

    this trigger is a vague sensation of “feeling bad”, “tension”, or “ickiness”. it’s the sort of thing i might experience right before my mother looks at me and says, “what’s wrong???”. it reminds me a lot of the “confusion” sensation, but it has more to do with me and my relationship to the world than with the world itself.

    “feeling bad” indicates that some concoction of unpleasant emotions is brewing. before i began learning emotional navigation, my default response to this was basically “ignore it”. which makes sense, i think. if your emotions seem unintelligible, and you wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway, then focusing on the bad feels will just make them worse.

    but over the past year, i’ve made my way out of that powerless position. i’ve learned that unpleasant emotions usually correspond to desires to change my behavior or context, and that they happen at critical intervention points. this is most of why emotional awareness is worth gaining.

awareness of my desires proved about as important as awareness of my emotions. in my next post, i plan to talk about “figuring out what i want”, and after that i’ll explain how i’ve come to use awareness of these two things to be more effective in general.

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p.s. i have a Patreon now! if you like it when i share the stuff i'm learning, you can provide me with financial incentives to do more of it. to become a patron or learn more about what's up with this, go to my Creator Page, or click the Patreon button in the top right.

1. Why I Never Go To Dinner Parties

Try to calculate 497x34 and 782+48 in your head, at the same time, as quickly as possible. While you’re at it, imagine that someone is reciting random numbers loudly right beside your ear. After twenty seconds, start calculating the square root of 73, whether you’re done with the last two problems or not.

That’s how group conversations are for me.

I mean, not really. It’s an exaggeration. But it’s the same sort of challenge I face in group conversations much of the time.

Here are my three main struggles in groups:

1: It’s sometimes hard multiple people for talk me at to filter once the sounds.

Sorry, let me break that down for you: Sometimes multiple people talk at once. It’s hard for me to filter the sounds.

I can’t filter out the sounds that aren’t relevant, so they blend together with the ones that are, and I have no idea what’s going on. If I focus really hard, often I can get something like, “it’s SOMETIMES hard MULTIPLE PEOPLE for TALK me AT to filter ONCE the sounds”, and from there I can figure things out. But it’s hard, and slow, and exhausting.

2: Sometimes people in

immediately after

and it bounces

one part of the group talk

people in another part,

around like that.

If I’m in a position where I can’t easily see everyone at once, my whole visual experience is in constant motion. That’s very disorienting for me. And I can’t just close my eyes, because lip reading helps me work out what people are saying.

3: The conversation moves quickly and it’s hard to speak and think at the same time so I can't go fast enough especially if I’m trying to track social things simultaneously which is hard by itself I never jump in right after someone stops talking because I’m still comprehending what they’ve said there's no time to have my own thoughts in response let alone put them into mouthwords so by the time I’m ready to speak someone else is already talking or maybe the conversation has moved to an entirely different topic and it's all so fast it makes it impossible to jump in and contribute.

2. How the Columbus Rationalists Solved Everything

Fortunately, it turns out there’s a solution to most of this, and it’s called “automoderation”.

In automoderated conversations, I’m able to participate. It creates discussions that are fluid, patient, and orderly, which accommodates my cognitive style.

Practitioners report that it increases efficiency for other neurotypes, too. But the difference for me in particular is astounding. When I tried it with a group who knew the system well, it made talking with about seven people as easy for me as one-on-one conversation, if not easier.

We’ve used it a little at Godric’s Hollow (my group house), and it did help - but everybody else was new to it, I couldn’t remember all the rules, and I couldn’t find a description of it online. Today I am excited, because yesterday, J posted a clear and thorough explanation of automoderation to his blog.

The rationality community in Columbus, Ohio, found itself in the position of needing a system of moderation for their discussions, in particular for a rationality dojo. A little over two years ago Max Harms along with another member of the community created a system of hand signals supporting moderation in smaller, less formal settings. This system was inspired by the Occupy movement hand signals. When all participants know the hand signals, a moderator may not even be needed. A moderator is still useful, but often does little besides clarifying the system and consequently introduces very little friction. This system of hand signals is called automoderation. It has been used successfully in groups as small as 3 to 4 people and as large as 15 to 20.

It uses a hierarchical system of five hand signals to determine who will speak when. Different signals indicate different kinds of conversational contribution: Raising your pointer finger, for example, means you want to ask a clarifying question, because you didn’t understand something the previous person said. When they’re done, it will be your turn

— unless somebody’s making a triangle with their fingers. The person making a triangle goes before you and your clarifying pointer finger. Triangle has top priority, because it indicates a meta point like “I can’t hear over the sound of the air conditioner. Can we turn it off and open a window instead?”

3. How It Works

The simple version goes like this:

1. When someone is done speaking, call on people who are signaling a desire to speak.
2. If two or more people are signaling, call on the one with the highest priority signal; break ties by going in a circle, clockwise from the last speaker.
3. If someone asks a question (probing or clarifying), the person they ask should respond; flow continues from the question answerer.

J’s post spells it out in a bunch more detail, and I recommend reading through it if you want to introduce this to a group yourself. But that’s the gist.

Here’s a chart with pictures of the signals, from first priority to last, to get you started.

There’s also a version with high enough resolution to make a poster, and another with extra text describing the system. Either would look lovely, I think, in the common area of an office or group house, nudge nudge wink.

I recently stumbled on a technique for making empathy easier: Get the other person to talk about something that has nothing to do with me.

By default, they'll talk about stuff that involves me, or interests me, for the obvious reason. If I'm not deliberately attempting empathy, talking about something that doesn't involve me in any way will in fact bore me.

But when empathy is a primary goal, I'm a distraction to myself. If I ask them about their experience of the interview I helped them prepare for, or about principles of mind design, or about the time when we went to the Exploratorium with mutual friends, then I can't help spending a lot of precious cognitive resources on things besides empathy.

But if I get them to talk about a time when they went out to dinner with their family, there is nothing whatsoever interesting about what they have to say except what the experience felt like and meant for them.

Note: This post makes more sense if you read or listen to Invincible Summer first. On Becoming Poems also helps.

One of the great lessons of mnemonics is “Memorable things are also impactful.”.

You may be riding an elephant that doesn’t care much about your puny reins, but if you’re a master mnemonist, you needn’t rely on reins. Memorable thought is not stored in a card catalog; it sinks deep into your mind where its tendrils intertwine with the rest of your knowledge and experiences. If you can think memorably, you’re an elephant whisperer.

There is a correlate: “If you know how to make something memorable, then you can impact other people, as well.”

This is a principle I ran with when I designed my speech Invincible Summer. I applied a lot of different mnemonic techniques, but most of all, I applied Becoming Poems. I developed a new technique I call “sentiment shaping and tuning”, which is basically Becoming Poems for composition, rather than learning.

Shaping

When I’ve talked about memorable thought in the past, I’ve mentioned that sticky things are “story-like”. “Shaping” refers to one central feature of stories: their emotional arcs.

I started with a couple of rough ideas, which I threw together into a draft. I edited the draft in the usual way until it made conceptual sense, more or less. Then the shaping began.

In terms of Becoming Poems, “shaping” corresponds to the step where you identify the structure of the edifice. The idea is to get an emotional handle on each block.

In composition, it includes the additional step of moving the blocks around. After all, a rough draft is a giant heap of bricks.

So I mashed everything together into a single block of text with no paragraph breaks, like laying the bricks out side by side. Then I read through, and inserted a line break every time I felt an emotional transition trying to happen. This left me with chunks of text organized by emotion.

Next, I labeled each chunk of text according to the main emotion(s) it wanted to express. I might have labeled this paragraph “presentation and invitation”, for example, because right now I have a feeling of showcasing a technique in a transparent way.

Then, I looked inside the chunks of text for smaller scale emotional transitions (like lines in a poem, rather than stanzas). The previous paragraph labeled “presentation and invitation” might have a more specific flow of “discernment, demonstration, illumination, explanation”.

Thus concludes the descriptive portion of shaping. So far, this is just what I would do if I were going to memorize the text.

Now for the exciting part.

I took all those labels and made a list, in the same order as the text but without any content. So it was just a list of emotions, something like

awe
longing
horror
curiosity
excitement
.
.
.

I walked through that list, simulating each emotion as I went, and attending to the overall effect of experiencing those emotions in that order.

Vonneghut famously identified eight emotional arcs for stories. A “man in hole” story is one with emotional valence that rises, falls, and then rises again at the end. A “rags to riches” story starts low and ends high.

So I thought about story arcs, and how mine might be shaped. My list looked like it wanted to be two man-in-hole arcs in a row, which a sentiment analysis of novels suggests is one of the most popular shapes. (It’s also my favorite.)

But the actual list didn’t have quite the smooth, satisfying, rise-fall-rise-fall-rise shape I imagined, so I rearranged the list items until it did. When I was done, I had two clear man-in-hole arcs, with the second bigger than the first.

Then I walked through the list again, and made a few more adjustments. Some places felt jarring - horror followed immediately by curiosity was difficult, for instance - so I inserted a new emotion that smoothed the transition: horror, grasping, curiosity.

And in some places there was a long string of similar emotions, which I knew wouldn’t work so well. So I kept the most important emotion in the string and cut the rest, or I combined them into a single, more complex emotion.

At the end, I had a list of a bit over 30 emotions, which sketched an emotional arc I was happy with.

But a list is not a speech.

So I re-arranged the original text blocks into the order of the desired emotional arc (having already conveniently labeled them by emotion). Then things got cut, combined, and added, to reflect changes I’d made to the original list.

Making sense of the concepts in the new order took some doing, but when I was done, the draft was far more fluid and satisfying than before.

Shaping:

0) Make a draft.
1) Label the emotions.
2) Write the emotions as a list.
3) Simulate the emotions in order.
4) Find a satisfying story shape that reminds you of the list.
5) Modify the list to match the chosen shape.
6) Make a new draft to match the list.

Tuning

Next came tuning. (This corresponds to “diving” in the Becoming Poems method.) I tuned everything, but focused on the points that mattered most, so they’d each be strong enough to carry the weight of the entire speech.

Under each emotion label, I looked at the phrases. Anything that didn’t cause me to feel the emotion I was going for got cut, or (where necessary) modified.

For the remaining phrases, I took anything that tried to point at the emotion abstractly, and replaced it with an image it would be easy to “dive” into if I were memorizing the text. “Boats are exciting” might become “the wheel’s kick, and the wind’s song, and the white sails’ shaking”.

Specifically, I made things concrete, emotional, multi-sensory, vivid, dynamic, story-like, and personally engaging. Here’s an example.

Desired emotions: Loss, hollowness, horror.
Original text: I have Seasonal Affective Disorder. Winter after winter, I forget who I am. I lose sight of my values, passions, aspirations, for months at a time.
Tuned version: I have Seasonal Affective disorder, so for me, this season really sucks. What it sucks, specifically, is my soul, out through my mouth, then hides it in tattered robes, while I become an empty shell of a person who doesn’t miss what they’ve forgotten they ever had.

The original text invites the audience to share a certain emotional experience with me. It’s like handing someone a flute and a piece of sheet music. The tuned version, though, is like sitting right next to them and playing the flute myself. There’s no question about whether the experience will be active in their minds, so I know there’s something solid to build the rest of the speech on.

I kept doing this with each section until System 1 groked every piece, until every phrase made the elephant move.

Tuning:

1) Know what emotions you’re going for.
2) Cut or modify anything that’s out of tune with the desired emotions.
3) Concertize every abstraction, and otherwise push toward memorability.
4) Keep at it until your elephant groks the whisper.

Campfires

I’ve gotten more intensely positive feedback for Invincible Summer than I have for anything else I’ve created so far. I think shaping and tuning was around a third of what caused that.

There are story shapes that fit snuggly in human minds. They evolved along side us, inside us. They’re part of what we are. When you hear them, you’re a hunter on the savanna at night, enthralled from across a campfire, while someone recounts a legend your tribe has told for ages.

It may be magic, but it’s not mysterious. The shapes are learnable. There are six of them, more or less.

Nonfiction is made from a tougher wood, but you can carve it all the same. You can shape and tune it like the fiction we’re built to love, if you learn the craft.

And when you whisper, minds will move.

I gave a speech at the 2016 Bay Area Secular Solstice ceremony, which I'm quite proud of and seems to have been well received. You'll probably like it if you think the world's in grave danger and are into saving it.

Here's a video of the whole Solstice. I start at 34:46, and go for about ten minutes. It cuts out for a few seconds toward the beginning, but comes back.

Content note: This is quite dark, involves depression, and mentions suicide.

And here's the (approximate) text. I do strongly recommend the video over just the text, though, because it's very much designed to be performed in bodyspace.

***

A stained glass palace hangs in the sky at dawn. I watch from below, circling, as wind caresses the feathers of my wings. The clouds, parting to flow around the Eastern tower, burn red-orange where they catch the sun.

This is a vision of Victory. A fantasy of how life might be, when humanity is safe, and free. A Dream.

I have dozens of Dreams: Ballets choreographed for free-fall. Base jumping without injury or death. Intellectual intimacy with friends, without the barrier of symbolic language.

But here on Ancient Earth, we’re not safe. Not yet. And I am especially unsafe in the Winter. I have seasonal affective disorder, so for me, this season can suck.

What it sucks, specifically, is my soul, out through my mouth, then hides it in tattered robes, while I become an empty shell of a person, who doesn’t miss what they’ve forgotten they ever had.

I remember a time, when I was very depressed, lying on the basement floor and staring at the ceiling. As I had been, for hours. It was like my veins were full of lead.

The line between obsessive thoughts and hallucination blurs at times like these. I saw ice water. I felt it, covering my body. And concrete pressed into my back, where I lay heavy at the bottom of a well. A deep well. Above me were miles of murky water. And I was drowning.

But even through all that water, I could see to the surface, if I tried. And above the well, filtering through the icy sludge, points of light swam into focus.

Not just above the surface, but lightyears away. They were the stars. And they grew brighter as I focused on them, their hearts igniting, and burning through the darkness, with an intensity I’d forgotten was possible.

And in the fire of those distant stars, I saw visions of myself. In one star, I was a professor, teaching logic to freshmen at a university. I could feel the chalk on my hands. In another, I was learning to paint.

And in a third star, the Summer sun warmed my face, and I was laughing, freely. Like that was… just… a normal thing to do.

I’d been very close to dying on that day. Winter had almost consumed me.

But when I saw the stars, when I felt them burning in the night, despite their impossible distance, despite the expectation that I’d never lift my arms, much less climb out of that well into the sky, I realized that I. Had. To live. I had to protect the possibility that I might teach. That I might paint. That I might feel the sun, one day, and laugh.

Today, I’m much more robust against the Winter. But I also see more darkness than I ever have before.

I see the darkness of an empty future. Of the stars grown cold, having meant nothing to anyone for more than one beat of a fragile heart.

It is hard to strive on empty. It’s hard to breathe another breath, and keep on breathing, when your lungs don’t know the taste of laughter.

And I don’t know that we can win. In fact, in the vast majority of timelines, we lose.

Because humanity is fragile and heavy, full of lead at the bottom of a well that seems far too deep to climb out of in time. Nobody’s gonna reach down from the sky to save us. There is no natural law saying that things must turn out ok in the end. No rescuer hath the rescuer. No Lord hath the champion, no mother and no father, only nothingness above. Nihil supernum.

And when I feel the depth of that darkness, smothered by despair at the challenge we face, sometimes it is tempting not to look so far ahead. To look at my feet, at just the next few years. To let myself drown.

Nihil supernum. Nothing above.

But with nothing above us, with nothing but ourselves holding us down, how high might we reach, if we manage stand at all? With what might we fill all that potential? Nihil supernum, absque capacitas crescendi - nothing above, except room to grow.

Dreams are not predictions. They’re by nature inaccurate and fanciful. But they are symbols of what we strive for. And we need them. We need to share them, to ignite each other. To forge the future in the furnace of our shared visions of Victory. We need, in the depths of Winter, to find within ourselves an invincible Summer.

However cold the night, however sharp the bitter winds of Winter, I will fight, forever, as long as I know the taste of Victory.

So I pluck the stars from my sky, the ones that burn brightest for me, that show me what might be, and why we have to live. I tuck them into the pockets of my soul, where I keep the precious things I’ll fight to protect, so that whenever I decide whether to drown or to blaze, in all the little choices made on ordinary days that lead toward or away from Victory, I find myself already on fire.

This is the fire that I share with you: A stained glass palace in the sunrise. The wind caressing my wings.

I have found myself repeating in conversation that studying mnemonics has changed my understanding of “learning”. I want to express what learning means to me now.

I’ll start with the basics, and lead you through my development. Say you want to remember the list “quail, Mars, roller coaster”.

The first mnemonic technique I learned was “linking”, and using that, I’d memorize the list thusly: First I imagine a quail. Then I link it to Mars by concocting an imagined scenario that includes both a quail and Mars. For example, perhaps the war god Mars, with his helmet and shield, impales the pet quail I’m holding and and waves it about on the end of his sword, leaving me scandalized, grief-stricken, and suddenly empty-handed.

Then I link “Mars” to “roller coaster” (sans quail). So now I and all the god-planets are lined up riding a roller coaster, and Mars has his arms in the air and is drunkenly bellowing Gustov Holst’s “Mars” at the top of his lungs as we go over the hills, to the dismay of the other planets (and myself).

After that, I might link “roller coaster” to “quail” so that I can start anywhere in the list and still retrieve all the items.

The linking technique is cute and sort of clever, and it’s handy for memorizing lists (which is in fact, on rare occasion, a worthwhile activity). And there are lots of other clever techniques that do similar things, all of which ultimately depend on linking.

But far more useful than linking per se proved my experience of failure to recall list items I’d attempted to link.

I failed a lot when I first started doing this.

Suppose that instead of the links I just described, I imagined a quail sitting beside the planet Mars. That’s still a link between “quail” and “Mars”, but it’s not a particularly memorable link, and there’s a good chance I’d drop it. I’d get to “quail” and go, “shit, I know the quail was sitting beside something, but what is it???” So then I'd go back, consult my written list, and make a new link between "quail" and "Mars", hoping this one would work better.

Just as knowing grammar and vocabulary isn’t enough to be an inspirational speaker, memorable thought is deeper than the tricks of the trade. It’s discovering that depth that has made all of this mnemonics stuff worthwhile for me.

As I’ve said in the past, I found I remembered more, and more easily, if my imagined scenarios were concrete, emotional, multi-sensory, vivid, dynamic, personally engaging, and story-like. “A quail beside the planet Mars” is at most one of those things. “Mars impaling my pet quail on a sword and waving it around while I cry about my loss” is all of them.

An even deeper mnemonic principle than the terms of System 1 language is conceptual confluence. Conceptual confluence is the way systems of concrete symbols can flow together with the structure and significance of the abstract concepts they represent.

If I’m memorizing a recipe, for example, rather than learning one long list of ingredients, it might be good to group all of the wet ingredients separately from the dry ingredients. (In case you’ve never baked from scratch: making a wet mixture and a dry mixture before combining wet and dry causes more even blending.)

I might also want to include the concepts “wet” and “dry” in the method of grouping. Perhaps the eggs, water, oil, and vanilla are all in a kiddie-sized blowup swimming pool, being sucked into a spinning vortex by a giant whisk. Meanwhile, the flour, baking soda, salt, and sugar are playing in a sandbox, when a spoon comes out of nowhere, buries them, and mixes them all together with the sand. Then a flood pours in from a kiddie pool and fills the sandbox with a sticky dough.

Now when I recall my recipe, rather than just having all the ingredients lined up on the table, it will be natural to put the wet and dry ingredients in separate bowls before mixing them together.

Additionally, the chunking of the information in my head corresponds to my external behaviors and experiences. As I go about my baking, associations with the relevant information lead me to access what I’ve stored exactly when I need it. “I seem to have laid out two bowls. Why two? Oh, because one is a pool, and the other’s a sandbox.” The mnemonic has a built-in trigger-action plan.

When I say that mnemonics has changed my understanding of learning, I mean that these deeper mnemonic principles have seeped into every educational thought I ever have. Any time I notice myself struggling even the slightest bit while trying to learn something - be it a skill or the point of a philosophical argument - I automatically reach for the structure and significance of the information, and try to express it in concrete, emotional, multi-sensory, vivid, dynamic, engaging, and story-like terms - just as if I had dropped a link.

For example, I was just reading about control theory, when I came upon this sentence in the fourth paragraph:

“The thing we're measuring is the input (to the controller), the level we want it to be at is the reference, the difference between those is the error, and the adjustment the control system makes is the output or feedback (sometimes we'll talk about the actuator as the physical means by which the controller emits its output).”

There are six central abstract concepts of control theory accompanied by seven terms, all of which are new to me, just in that one sentence. “That,” thought I, “is an Important Sentence. If I don’t make it a part of myself, the rest of this essay is going to be nonsense.”

Note that I am not interested in memorizing the terms. I don’t need to rattle them off in a hurry as a list. There will be no vocabulary test with bubbles darkened by a number two pencil. I do not need to memorize this sentence.

What matters is that I arrange some part of my mind into a coherent model of a “control system” - one that includes all the major components, their relationships to each other, and their impact on the system - with associations that will call the relevant parts to mind any time I see a word like “reference” in the text.

I paused, looked toward the meaning of the sentence, and began to associate.

I imagined a pot of heated water sitting atop a coal-powered stove. I’m holding a sensor that looks like a cross between a kazoo and a remote control for a television. I use an eye dropper to put a few drops into one end of the kazoo control, which happily gobbles up its input while making contented yum yum noises.

In my other hand, I am holding a large reference book, and I refer to a page on which is written a temperature that is the reference for this system. The control... defecates, I suppose, a bit of ticker tape out its other end, declaring the temperature of the input water. I compare the reference to the ticker tape number, and if they don’t match, I press a big red button on the kazoo control, which makes a grating “errrrrr, wrong!” buzzer sound, louder for greater differences between the numbers, indicating the error.

Startled by the sound of the button, a mechanical arm with an ax-like shovel on the end (the actuator) begins to act, shoveling coal, feeding it into the stove, grumbling as though it’s a bit put out by all this work it has to do (this behavior is the feedback or output). It shovels coal faster the louder the sound. The stove, exhilarated by its meal, burns hotter, returning the water's temperature to the reference written in my book.

Ok. At this point, I have explained control systems to the parts of my brain (and yours!) that actually matter for real learning.

I can tell because if that crucial sentence were suddenly deleted, I could compose something equivalent on my own, even if the lingo that comes out isn’t quite standard.

But I wouldn’t need to write down an equivalent sentence anyway, because my comprehension is beyond words now. The words have done their job, and I can leave them behind. They’re just triggers. I have built inside my mind a structure that directly supports further understanding of anything and everything about control systems.

If it turns out that there’s something wrong with my understanding of control systems, I’ll be able to notice because my control system will fail to behave the way it’s supposed to, and then I’ll adjust the structure. (…I’ll adjust it as much as is needed to align it with the reality of control systems, but will otherwise leave it be. Hey look, a control system! Yeah? Maybe? I guess I’ll find out when I read the rest of the essay.)

This is just how I think about things now, when my goals aren’t being effortlessly met. I think like this when I listen to people explain things, when I reason about problems, when I consider gaining new abilities, when I hear a poem that I want to fully experience, when I want to communicate with other people in a way that will help them hold onto the things that I tell them.

And yes, I can meet twenty people in five minutes and remember all of their names, if I want. Or recite a memorized speech. Or count cards. And that’s fun.

But it’s all silly party tricks compared to the deeper art of memorable thought.

---

Bonus problem:

To think memorably, you need to associate with abstract concepts in was that are concrete, emotional, multi-sensory, vivid, dynamic, personally engaging, and storylike; while encoding the structure and significance in your system of symbols; with links to experiences you’ll have when you most need to call on what you’ve learned.

What structure can you build in your mind that will support the application and development of your art of memorable thought?

There are a lot of things I need to be happy that feel unreasonable to me.

For example, it’s usually not possible for me to be comfortable in chaotic environments, like bus stations and sports bars. Or when the refrigerator is buzzing at the wrong pitch. Or when someone says words near me that require a response when I wasn’t prepared for language.

If it were just a few things, I imagine I’d be ok with it. But it’s a lot of things. They’re things that interact with nearly every aspect of daily life, imposing all sorts of constraints on my existence, and especially on socialization. Imagine being invited to meet friends you like a lot for lunch, but the place they’ve chosen has five car alarms going off inside. Or always having to speak a second language, any time you want to communicate in bodyspace, that you aren’t close to fluent in. Or a party where people whack each other with baseball bats at random. “What’s wrong, don’t you like parties???”

I’ve just spent a month doing a lot of traveling to visit family. As a result, I’ve had much less control over my experiences than I usually do. I’ve had little control over where I sleep, where I work, what I eat, who I talk to and when and how, what I hear, what I see, what I smell, etc. For a whole month. It's been... stressful.

So I’ve been thinking a lot about my responses to these things. By default, it seems I try to ignore or endure all this stuff. In the company of others especially, I try to behave as though everything is fine. “I’m going to run away because there is a light flashing in the window of the building next door” is not a thing I enjoy saying to people who don’t know me well. “Omg she’s such a prissy little princess.”

And I’ve noticed I’m really not being very agenty about any of this, partially because I’ve only recently recognized that it’s even a thing, and largely because I’m ashamed of my weaknesses. (And we all know that if you ignore something you’re ashamed of, it goes away.)

But I got to hang out with one of my friends who knows me well while I was visiting the Midwest, and he was proactive about helping me be comfortable. It was amazing. He did things like not talk to me while I was reading the menu, suggest that we go for a walk in a quiet park, and make simple decisions on my behalf when I was too overwhelmed to think.

I’ve come to think of it as “being my guide dog”, and I was immensely grateful.

I suspect I have a lot of friends who would be eager to help me in similar ways if only they knew how. One step toward a more agenty approach is to create affordances for those friends to make things easier for me when we’re together.

So I’ve compiled a list of behaviors that constitute “being my guide dog”. I’ll try to add to it over time as I learn more about myself.

Travel

Travel is the most stressful thing I do regularly. It tends to involve high-stakes decision making under time pressure in extremely chaotic environments while people try to talk to me and ask me questions. (Think of airport security, or a subway station with crucial announcements over a shitty loud speaker.) Intervening in this area is very high leverage for increasing my comfort.

• Literally guide me around.
• Meet me at the airport or bus station and tell me you'll take it from here.
• Know how to get where we’re going.
• Choose streets with fewer cars and less chaos.
• Take my hand and decide when we cross the street.
• Coordinate transportation for me.
• Hail the Uber and identify it when it arrives.
• Tell me where to be when, how to get there, and when to leave my house.
• Prevent me from having to drive at night, or in the rain.
• Prevent me from being rushed.
• Offer to drive me.

Environments

I am almost literally never in an environment that makes me feel really safe. The safest environment I've ever been in was a Zen temple on top of a mountain in rural North Carolina during a silent retreat. "Make things more like a monastic retreat" is a good rule of thumb when crafting a Brienne-friendly environment.

• Choose a calm and quiet meeting place.
• Choose restaurants with no TVs or loud music.
• Turn off the TVs.
• Only play music that lacks lyrics.
• Play rain and thunder sounds (you have no idea how soothing this is to me).
• Take me to a lake, river, creek, or garden.
• Pay the bill and send me a reimbursement request via Square.

Communication

Talking out loud is hard for me. I try to think the thoughts, and the feedback from my mouth and throat and ears distracts me. Parsing speech is also hard. So being asked a simple question can be a bit like, "Quick, what's 345 times 78?"

• Speak slowly, clearly, and at a moderate volume.
• Use a direct communication style (be blunt), to minimize the cognitive resources I have to spend on figuring out what you actually mean (odds are good I just won't spend them, and I'll fail to understand you entirely).
• Avoid sarcasm and other humor that relies on awareness of deception.
• Relax and be comfortable with silence (don’t talk just to fill silences).
• Don’t interrupt me.
• Don’t expect me to interrupt you when I want to get a word in. I'll get frustrated and just stop trying to talk.
• If you want to show me text on your phone, read it to me instead of handing me your phone. That's probably a little counter-intuitive, but it's some kind of switching-modes thing that is really hard for me.
• Ask me specific questions (less like “what have you been up to?”, more like “what poetry have you been learning?”).
• Prevent me from having to make phone calls.
• Don’t talk to me while I’m reading (as from a menu).
• If I’m reading or have been silent for a long time, text me the first line of what you want to say (it gives me time to adjust, and gives me the option of responding via text). This is especially good for questions.

Group Contexts

People are chaotic. More people are more chaotic. I'm often debilitatingly overwhelmed in groups.

• Speak to me only when nobody else is talking; don’t start a side conversation with me.
• Don’t invite more people at the last minute.
• Use hand signals to auto-moderate group conversations (ask me how if you’ve never done this).
• Give me the end seat at the table so I hear fewer discussions at once.
• If you're high status in the group or are otherwise the center of attention, set an example of conversing clearly and patiently.

Self Awareness

The more overwhelmed I am by external stimuli, the less likely I am to be aware of my own internal state. I'll also be less aware of your internal state, even though I'm perfectly capable of empathizing with you when I manage to devote resources to it.

• Remind me I have noise-canceling earbuds.
• Remind me I have night glasses for bright lights.
• Remind me I can go somewhere else.
• Ask me how I’m feeling.
• Tell me how you're feeling and what you want, at the slightest provocation.
• Ask me how I think you’re feeling. Connecting with you empathetically can actually be grounding, especially if you're feeling calm and confident.

To be clear, you don’t have to do any of these things when you’re hanging out with me. I'm not even making a request. I've gone my whole life without people catering to my pesky little preferences in every interaction, so I'm not depending on you to do this. I'm just providing an opportunity.

But if you’re actively looking for a way to make my life easier, doing any subset of these thins will help. If the spirit of the entire list appeals to you, you can tell me, “I want to be your guide dog” when you see me (or beforehand), and you will probably find that I’m much more relaxed around you.

It’s well past time for us to stop saying “irl” when we talk about the part of the world that our bodies occupy. Same for “in person”.

A few days ago, I was at a cafe, when the fifty-something stranger sitting beside me said, "Oh, you've got one of them fancy phones! ‘Smart phone’, right? I've been thinking about getting one, but I duuno if I'd be able to use it." I was a little startled to encounter someone who was unfamiliar with smart phones, but I didn’t think much of it.

Shortly thereafter, I had lunch with my brother and his girlfriend (both of whom are in their 20s). We were all visiting my hometown. She also had one of them fancy phones, and she was showing us how her followers had responded to the photos she’d posted of her visit.

I thought of the older man then, and the comparison filled me with warmth and transcendence. I became aware that there’s something wrong with the way I’ve been thinking of on-line interactions all this time.

“Birthform is not true shape. I am not some hairless ape,” as the saying goes. I’m information that happens to be encoded, for now, mostly in a squishy ape brain. But it’s the information that counts.

So this is me talking to you right now. Even though it's across time as well as space. Me. In real life. In person. Our togetherness is not somehow fake just because I'm not looking at you with my eyeballs and vibrating my vocal chords. I am with you more certainly than if our bodies silently shared space on the same bench while our minds moved elsewhere.

There are many people who see my body on a regular basis, but are far less familiar with the patterns of my mind than is someone who’s read a single Agenty Duck blog post. If you read my thoughts, then you know me, regardless of whether you’ve encountered my body in bodyspace, because I am those patterns.

And I can go so many places, and be together with so many people, while my body chills in an otherwise empty room. My keyboard is as much a part of my body as is my larynx, and Agenty Duck is as much a part of my home as is my kitchen.

When my friend took out her phone and showed us her Instagram photos, especially the one of the winery right by my mom’s house, I felt the presence of her followers in my little town. I felt the expansiveness of her augmented mind, how tremendously powerful she is compared to the man who dunno if he can use one of them fancy phones. She is something different. Something new.

So no more “irl”. No more “in person”.

We are bigger now, and our world is deeper. Let’s talk about “bodyspace”, denying neither the analog sensorium nor the digital realm. Let’s not slip into oppressive patterns of speech and thought that mask the extent of our reality.

Committing a poem to memory is about becoming the poem. The words on the page are just blueprints. They aren’t the poem itself.

When I learn a poem, what I’m learning is a way of arranging my mind. The words suggest how to do that. If all goes well, the arrangement of my mind looks something like the mind of the poet.

I’ve been skimming articles on poetry memorization and recitation today, and I think everyone I’ve so far read is confused about what a “poem” is. They talk like a poem is a series of words, like it can go on a sheet of paper, and your brain is a xerox machine that makes a copy and files it away in a manila envelope labeled “poems”.

They advise that you to read the poem many times, write it out by hand, take it a couple lines a day, and recite it over and over to people and mirrors and dogs.

That is not learning poetry. That is copying blueprints.

Granted, I’m pretty sure that once you’ve recited it from memory enough times, the true form of the poem will begin to build itself in your mind, whether you like it or not. But humans make poor xerox machines, and this seems a terribly inefficient way to learn a poem.

Here is what it was like for me to learn “Sea Fever” the other day.

First of all, I read it, and halfway through realized I loved it and was going to commit it to memory.

So I reflected on what I’d just read, long enough to imagine myself a sea captain in love with the ocean. By “imagine myself a sea captain”, I mean that I invoked a character, in the same way I would if I were playing one on stage. If I reach to touch my face while preparing to recite this poem, I half expect to feel a tangled beard hanging from my chin.

Then I read the first phrase (in character): “I must go down to the sea again”. I look for the emotion behind those words, and once I’ve caught a glimpse, I amplify it. Craving, longing, adoration, desire, determination, resolve.

I feel the emotions with my body, in the way it makes me want to move and act, to position myself. In this case, I feel forward movement, reaching, the clenching of a fist, a tall firm stance, a nod of certainty.

When I speak the line, I fill my voice with those emotions, and I let the sound of the emotions resonate in my mind, amplifying them further.

I latch onto all the sensory information in the phrase, situating it in an imagined physical space. Here there is an image of the sea, and returning to it. I picture the ocean, feel the breeze, hear the crashing waves, and imagine myself walking toward it with eager steps of reunion and love.

I steep the scene in the emotions I identified before, tweaking it if it doesn’t quite mesh with them, until it seems a fitting illustration of the feeling.

Then I taste the music of the phrase, its rhythm and sounds, sweeping over the experience of the scene according to the cadence of the words.

This often modifies the bodily urges, as I’m drawn to gesture at the locations of the physical objects, or to imitate their movements, or emphasize a sound. If you watch me recite, you’ll see that I sort of dance my poems.

I think of all of this as “diving into” the phrase.

Then I read the next phrase, and read the first together with the second, and then the next, diving into each substructure until the string of phrases completes a coherent thought.

Once I have two coherent thoughts, I dive into the relationship between them, the transition points, the ways they fit together.

In Sea Fever, I learned the first stanza like so, diving into each structure in turn:

1. I must go down to the sea again
2. to the lonely sea and the sky
3. I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky
4. And all I ask
5. And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by
6. I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky/ and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by
7. and the wheel’s kick
8. and the wind’s song
9. and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song
10. and the white sails shaking
11. and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sails shaking
12. and a grey mist
13. and a grey mist on the sea’s face
14. and a grey dawn breaking
15. and a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking
16. and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sails shaking/ and a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking
17. I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky/ and all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;/ and the wheel’s kick [note: this is a transition point]
18. I must go down to the sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky/ and all I ask is a tall ship, and a star to steer her by/ and the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sails shaking/ and a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking

How many times have I read the stanza by the time I’ve constructed its full form in my mind? How many repetitions does it take me to memorize a poem?

Well, it depends on how you count. In a sense, two: one pass to be inspired to learn it, and a second to actually learn it. But I’m not “reading” it in an ordinary way.

“How many repetitions?” is a little like asking “how many times do you have to read the manual to put together an Ikea desk?”

Just one, right? But you’re not reading it like a newspaper, you’re pausing at each step to follow the instructions, inserting tab A into slot b and so forth. When I construct a poem with my mind, I pause at each step to follow the instructions.

(Time-wise, Sea Fever took me between fifteen and twenty minutes to learn, while going for depth rather than speed.)

So by the time I’m done, I can walk through the poem as I’d walk through a building designed by an architect (…if buildings could experience themsleves). I’m not tracing out its blueprints. I’ve used the materials of my mind to construct the actual poem - in thoughts, emotions, sounds, smells, and movement - and now it’s part of who I am.

If you like poetry and you’ve never learned to recite a poem from memory by means other than rote memorization, I recommend trying this. It’s been revelatory for me.

If you’re looking for a place to start, Sea Fever is a great pick. It’s concrete multi-sensory imagery the whole way through, and it isn’t free verse.

I feel like I didn't understand what poetry was before I started doing this. I think I was looking at the blueprints of poems, and thinking some of them awfully pretty pictures.

Now I think poems are not things we read, but things we become.

---

Sea Fever by John Masefield

I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;
And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Me: I want a pony.

Eliezer: I’m not sure if we can afford a pony. How much does a pony cost? Maybe I can get you a pony if ponies are cheap on Craigslist.

Me: Thank you, but I wasn’t making a request. I was merely trying to create common knowledge about my desires.

Eliezer: I don’t see the distinction. When I respond to a request, I am responding to new information about what you want.

Me: No.

Eliezer: No? I think yes.

Me: No.

It’s important that we have different concepts for what I want independently of you, what you want independently of me, and what our joint extrapolated volition prescribes. If you respond to your belief about my belief about what our joint extrapolated volition prescribes, when I’ve intended only to provide evidence of my independent desires, then… problems.

Like, maybe I’ll say that I want a pony, because I wonder if you have insight into alternative ways of satisfying the need responsible for that desire, and you’ll try to get me a pony, when I don’t actually think it’s a good idea for us to have a pony.

Eliezer: Oh! Yes, that makes sense. That is a thing in Bayesian networks.

Me: Oh?

Eliezer: When stating your independent desires, you should begin by saying “lambda”. Refer to my independent desires with “pi”. And call the prescription of our joint extrapolated volition “BEL”.

Me: Do you want to explain to me where those terms come from?

Eliezer: *begins to explain belief propagation*

Me: Wait. That's not what I meant. Let me try that again.

Do you pi want to explain the thing?

Eliezer: *thinks* That sounds fun, so yes.

Me: Oh good! Then I BEL want you to explain the thing.

Eliezer: *explains belief propagation*

[Note: I’m not sure about my hypnosis terminology in this post. In fact I'm confident I'm using it weirdly. Almost all my experience is as subject, so I mostly just know what hypnotists do and how I respond, not what they call it or how they think about it.]

There's a suggestion technique called the hypnotic bind, which everyone heard a bunch when they were five. It looks something like, “Would you rather put away your toys now, or do you want to put them away after dinner?”

Consider what happens in a child's mind when they hear this.

They've been asked a question, so they're inclined to engage their attention in a search for an answer. But the search space for the answer is limited to the space of thoughts that assume they will clean up their toys at some point tonight.

Furthermore, the process of searching for an answer costs them attention, which limits their awareness of the broader desires they feel at the moment. (They want to keep coloring, and they don't want to put away their toys at all.)

So they say, "After dinner."

When this goes as planned, what they are aware of having just experienced is a weighing of options against their values, and then a decision among the options based on those values. When you experience the weighing of options followed by a decision based on your values, it feels a lot like you want whatever it is you've just chosen.

Used as a hypnotic technique, double binding is often about belief and perception of things besides choice. “Do you think you’ll fall deeply into trance now, or will you drift there more slowly as you listen to my words?” Either way, you’re attentive to whatever sensations are consistent with “going into trance”, which is over half of hypnosis right there.

(Wake up, hypnogeeks, that was just an example. I mean, unless you don’t want to. Would you rather enjoy my post from within trance, or is it just as fun to read from ordinary awareness? Or maybe you’ll love it most while mildly fractionated.)

Hypnotic binds don't have to take the either/or form, though. I often use single binding deliberately when I teach: When I pause for questions, I always ask, "What questions do you have?", and never "Are there any questions?"

Since students usually do have questions but often have trouble identifying them on command, directing their attention to the range of thoughts that assume they have questions saves them some work: It leaves more of their cognitive resources available for choosing among the questions that they have.

"Are there any questions?", by contrast, directs attention to the search space of "yes" and "no" - neither of which is itself a question! I always have trouble with this when someone asks me “any questions?”. “Welp, I see no questions in this search space, so I guess the answer is no.”

Binding is tricky. It's verbal sleight of hand. Sleight of mouth, if you will. And I've encountered it enough in hypnosis that I can sometimes pick out and notice the sensation of having just been hypnotically bound.

Sometimes this causes me to giggle unhelpfully in the middle of an induction. The hypnotist wants to create a floating arm effect, so they say, “As you relax more deeply, how much lighter does your arm begin to feel?”

And I think, “You crafty bastard! That directs my attention to sensations that are consistent with my arm already feeling light, decreasing my attention to sensations of heaviness!”

(Which doesn’t seem to prevent me from taking the suggestions, mostly.)

But it’s not just the verbal pattern I’m noticing when that happens. Among other effects of this suggestion is a feeling that presumably corresponds to my attention having been suddenly restricted to a smaller set of experiences, without an accompanying decision to focus my attention. It feels like something slipping, something incongruous, and there’s pressure in a direction, with a sense of unfamiliarity like the source of the pressure is external.

It’s very subtle, compared to the other things going on in my experience at that point. If I weren’t intensely curious about this sort of thing, I might never have noticed. But it’s there.

I’ve recently begun to notice inadvertent binding outside of the context of hypnosis, and I’m finding awareness of binding to be an important epistemic skill.

Which should not be surprising, in retrospect, because hypnotic binding is a way of deliberately inducing carefully crafted motivated cognition in another person, and I’ve long known “awareness of motivated cognition” to be an important epistemic skill. But “motivated cognition” comes in many forms; this is a special flavor of it, a non-central instance caused by someone else’s phrasing, and it’s usually extremely subtle.

Inadvertent binding has happened to me a few times in the past couple weeks, and it happened today.

I was talking on Facebook about the virtue of recklessness, and about how I approach difficult or dangerous things differently now than I used to, because three years ago, Eliezer observed that I was not failing often enough. So I updated.

Someone asked for concrete examples of things I've chosen to do because I made that update.

In response, I started listing things: Motivation characters, a week of “doing whatever I want”, formatting and publishing Eliezer’s novella, NaNoWriMo, trying to write a book on microrationality, falling in love with someone very dissimilar to me.

But as I listed, I felt a strange thing: Like something slipping, something incongruous, pressure in a direction with a sense of unfamiliarity as though its source is external. It felt like a hypnotist was messing with my perceptions through hypnotic binding.

The truth is that I don’t know which of my choices were caused by the update. It seems likely that I would have done a lot of the same things, or at least similar things, but my approach to trying things would have caused me to succeed more weakly when I did succeed, fail harder when I failed, and suffer more from my failures.

That answer - the truth - was not in the search space to which the question directed my attention.

The space of thoughts I was attending to was “things I’ve done in the past three years”. “I don’t know” is not a thing I’ve done in the past three years. Neither is “it’s more complicated than that”.

So I picked the least bad-sounding elements of the search space. It’s just like how “I don’t want to put my toys away” is neither “toys away now” nor “toys away later”, and “toys away later” is the least bad-sounding option in current awareness. “I just want to keep coloring” doesn’t cross the kid’s mind as a possible response.

Fortunately, in this case, I realized what had happened right after posting the comment, and was able to follow up with a correction. I’m sure I have failed at this many, many times in the past. It basically makes me lie, accidentally, in order to comply with the suggestion that I should have an answer of a certain type, or an answer at all.

I’ve sometimes felt a little worried when asking, “What are your questions?” while teaching a class. I’m worried about what I’m doing to the minds of people who don’t have any questions. Occasionally, I’ll respond to this discomfort by clumsily tacking on, “It’s ok if you don’t have any questions,” which explicitly suggests that they don’t have any questions! Which is the opposite of helpful for the people who struggle to identify the many important questions they do have.

On net, “What are your questions?” is probably best. I might even use the parental double bind, under some circumstances.

But if ever you find yourself listening to me, and I pause for questions, pay attention to what goes on in your head. See if you can feel yourself searching for the least bad element of the set of thoughts that might be questions, while neglecting all the other kinds of thoughts you could be having instead.

Even if it prevents you from identifying your questions, recognizing the sensation may empower you to escape inadvertent hypnotic binding later on.

So there was some stuff here you might not have encountered before - about hypnosis, or suggestion techniques, or phenomenology - and I’m sure I didn’t communicate all of it perfectly.

What are your questions?

Me: Ok, so who’s here?

Worker: I was clearly here today. We got so much done! I want a different name but I obviously exist coherently already. Also, “me”?

Me: Well what do you want to call the part of us that does things like call to order a meeting of imaginary characters to begin an experiment in increasing the efficiency of goal pursuit?

Worker: How about you ask the part who would do something like brainstorm names to answer that question? Call them Dream for now and change it later if they want.

Dream: Well, what are your properties?

Me: I like planning things, imposing structure, leading people, organizing closets, making spreadsheets that do statistical analyses of my friendships, composing lesson plans, untying knots, writing performance reviews, building fires without matches or lighters, using Workflowy for everything even when that doesn’t make much sense, proving theorems, self improvement projects, and lojban.

Dream: I think you’ve actually just spoken for two different people. One of them is a facet of Beauty (which is too ubiquitous to be a single personality when we’re trying to cut at the joints of drive to action instead of value), and the other is a facet of Transcendence. The Beauty facet should maybe be known as Order, or possibly The Logician or The Ice Man. The Transcendence facet might be Will, Drive, Power, Executive, Leader, Lion, Ruler, Sovereign -

Sovereign: Yes. That. I am Sovereign. Thank you. And to be clear, I like planning things, imposing structure, leading people, writing performance reviews, building fires without matches or lighters, and self improvement projects. I am less fond of organizing closets, making spreadsheets, untying knots, using Workflowy just for the hell of it, proving theorems, and lojban. But I’m not sure that second set of things ought to get a personality. I think “Order” is something that runs through all of us, like Beauty, but it is not really a drive for action. I don’t think we need to give it entire days to ensure its values are satisfied.

With respect to the goal of ensuring all our drives are optimally exercised to achieve peak performance, I think the best way to structure this meeting is as follows:

1. Identify the part that calls to order this sort of meeting. (Check.)
2. Make a list of some activities we did during the week of “Doing What We Want instead of What We’re Supposed To Do”.
3. Break those activities into clusters
4. Look for motivation patterns.

I’ll re-evaluate at that point. Worker, 2 is a data entry task. Why don’t you take over.

Worker: Certainly.

A: Listen to 99% Invisible podcast, Listen to classical music, Surf stumbleupon for art for my beauty tumblr, Talk to Sam about art, Find new music, Find the best existing rendition of a given song, Hypnosis

B: Lojban, Learn real analysis, Prove theorems, Write things about philosophy of self, Statistics, Learn metaethics, Explicit modeling of friendship, Play piano,

C: Read fiction, Talk to Max, Leave Facebook for a week, Listen to Bossa Nova, Turn off computer by 10PM, Cook things, Go on a walk to get coffee

D: Listen to Writing Excuses podcast, Deliberately practice various cognitive habits, Reflect on various cognitive habits, Propose laundry room protocol for Godric’s, Talk to Russell, Write about inhibition, Compose an OKCupid profile, Learn new acrobatics stuff

E: Maintenance housework, Misc. chores, Inbox zero, Make a document of favorite posts on r/FifthWorldProblems, Friendship models spreadsheet data entry, Student loan tasks, Answer questions on OKCupid profile, Use a schedule

F: Go dancing, Go running, Hike 20 miles to Castro Valley, Practice acrobatics stuff

G: Begin to get to know new housemate, Write about empathy, Read about cryonics life insurance plans for people in their 50s, Counsel Eliezer, Talk to Marie about (stuff), Talk to Liz about (stuff), Read about Harriet Tubman, Hang out with Oliver, Watch a movie with the Godric’s Society, Talk to Brent about (stuff)

Sovereign: Great, thanks. Now I’ll go back and put them in some kind of order. Yes that looks better. Hm, I think I’m losing concentration. We didn’t sleep a lot last night. Let’s take a break. I’ll make sure we get back to this tomorrow morning.

---

Sovereign: Lemme just read back over what happened yesterday. I’m still a little unfocused but I think I’m probably strong enough for this to be worth it. Dream, tell us some stories about these clusters. The stories can be fictional as long as you’re inspired by our observations, so please do have at it and don’t pay any mind to Truth.

Dream: Cluster A corresponds at least in part to an obsession with beauty. It’s an isolated part, mostly cut off from the rest of humanity and the ordinary world. It is timeless, in the sense of feeling no time pressure. When it is in full possession of body and consciousness we are a cottonwood seed suspended far above the world, in contact with nothing but the object of our obsession.

Cluster B is quite similar to cluster A, but is more active. I think they’re two moods of the same thing. Cluster B wants to create, to become, to embody beautiful things. It is willing to engage with the world in order to shape it into correspondence with Forms in the Platonic Realm. It is also obsessed, but unlike cluster A, B’s obsession comes with compulsions. B is a student. It trains its mind on a body of knowledge, holds onto it, and will not let go until it has made itself a perfect reflection of that part of the world. It forgets to eat or sleep, forgets about plans and other people. Cluster B is DEDICATED and loves to strive. It’s only satisfied when it has pushed us as far as we can go, and has replicated, as perfectly as possible, a beautiful part of the world, in the form of thought, to assimilate and make a permanent part of us. I’d call the first two Obsession.

Cluster C likes simplicity, comfort, relaxation. It wants to be untroubled, to feel grounded, to be in direct contact with the outside world and to revel in its ability to connect with that world. It watches ants and feels awe and fascination. It hears a cow and laughs with joy at the sound. It finds a hidden tunnel and wants to explore. When we hear the sound of rain in a forest, it takes full control. It is Kodama. It hates cities. It is frightened of complexity, abstraction, noise, bustle. It used to be terrified of people. It likes My Neighbor Totoro, and collects pinecones and acorns. It is a simple, childlike kind of mind. It's the source of our phenomenological sensitivity, our mindfulness.

Cluster D is Sovereign, Growth, Opportunity. It’s the only one of us with distant time horizons. It sees what we might become, and it moves toward that vision as naturally as water flowing downstream. It is a leader. It has the power to re-structure our whole mind, to inspire all of us to organize, cooperate, align. Without Sovereign we’d be directionless, always at each other’s throats and accomplishing nothing.

Sovereign: Aw, shucks.

Worker: He’s right, though. Even I would hardly ever get anything done. When you’re sleeping we’re helpless.

Dream: She leads other people too. She wants to empower others. She wants to uplift entire species. She wants everyone to become, to grow, to thrive, by their own power.

Cluster E likes clear, concrete, quantifiable progress.

Worker: That’s me! Can we start calling me something else now? Please?

Dream: I’m getting there. Patience. When Cluster E steps in Shit Gets Done. Not just planned, not strategized, not motivated, just fucking DONE. When she’s in complete control we’re an unstoppable machine.

Obsession: Hey, I’m an unstoppable machine too.

Dream: Yes I know, I never said otherwise. Progress actually goes places, though. She has kinetic energy. You’re more like gravity.

Obsession: Hrmph.

Sovereign: The two of you are most spectacular when you work together, of course. Progress + Obsession. One of my favorite resources.

Dream: Progress loves checklists, outlines, executing plans, dry erase markers, physical labor, and anything that involves putting the world in order. (Did I miss anything?)

Progress: I also like climbing mountains and then looking down on the tiny houses and people far below. And I sort of like when we’re praised for our accomplishments.

Sovereign: But probably not as much as I do.

Progress: No, not as much as you. I like when my work is acknowledged, because then it feels more real, but I don’t care much about being admired. I’m not very social.

Sovereign: Let’s move on.

Dream: Cluster F might be Dancer, Body, Athlete. But honestly it feels to me like this cluster is just what happens when the rest of us focus on Body instead of Mind. We want to obsess, strive, grow, conquer, play, be grounded, and make progress.

Sovereign: But what is it we get from the bodily focus that we don’t get from the psychological focus? I mean, running does something to us psychologically that nothing else does.

Dream: Sovereign and Kodama get restless when they don’t get to use Body. Sovereign wants the concrete experience of physical power and exertion, and Kodama wants to touch the world with its hands and feet, to feel itself moving through space, and to give physical form to playfulness. Kodama has an intimate relationship with Body. Body’s important, but not a drive in itself.

Cluster G is social. It’s grown a lot recently, but it’s always been the source of our compassion. It cares about other people as ends in themselves (unlike Sovereign or Obsession, who use people to accomplish other goals). These days it feels pleasure when we experience empathy. It’s responsible for our social bonds, for feeling connected with a community, for wanting other people to get what they want. It’s the part that has always really meant the first Bodhisattva vow: “Sentient beings are numberless. I vow to save them.” When it’s in complete control, we are flooded with love, and it tries to reach out into the world to encompass everyone to protect them and nurture them and give them whatever they need. It would spend all its strength to destroy Azkaban, if the rest of us didn’t intervene. It is Avalokiteśvara. It is also the service submissive, the one who wants to anticipate Master’s needs and fulfill them before he has the chance to feel any lack. It feels pain at the distance between what humanity is and what it could be, and it begs Sovereign to heal the wound in time. It is the only one of us who understands others as people, and it is the source of our capacity to feel loved and cared for by the people around us.

Sovereign: So to recap, that’s Obsession, Kodama, Progress, Avalokiteśvara, and Sovereign. Does anyone else want to jump in and claim to be one of our major drives toward action?

Dream: I mean, I think I probably actually do belong on that list. I’m basically the source of our creativity. Without me you couldn’t make lesson plans, or mnemonics, or write or even appreciate stories. I was in charge for huge chunks of November, even though Obsession and Progress obviously had a share in Nanowrimo as well. We’re happier (and smarter!) when I get regular play time, and since I don’t force myself into awareness like the rest of you, it’s even more important I be explicitly included in negotiations and plans.

Sovereign: That’s a strong argument. Does anyone object to that?

Obsession: Nope, we get along great.

Progress: As long as he and Kodama and obsession don’t get together without any oversight. That’s how we end up spending whole days watching Sherlock or whatever, and nothing gets done even if we agreed to let me plan.

Sovereign: As long as we’re not depressed, nobody does anything without my oversight. I understand your concern, but that kind of thing basically only happens when we haven’t been taking care of Kodama. We’ll bring Dream in on this, and if you start to feel like it’s interfering, Progress, speak up and we’ll renegotiate.

Now then. The next order of business is to decide what exactly want to do with these personalities to start out. This seems like a good place to pause. Let’s take a break and reconvene later.

Progress: I say we reconvene immediately after lunch.

Sovereign: Of course you do. Ok, we’ll take a vote immediately after lunch about when to reconvene, with “now” as the default.

---

Sovereign: Dream, we didn’t hear your description of yourself. I guess we didn’t do much Dreaming in the past week or so, so you weren’t one of the clusters.

Dream: Yeah, I’d like to get more time. But I imagine you’d rather talk about that later.

Sovereign: Yeah, for now let’s hear about who you are.

Dream: I make connections. I strip mine the association network, and I weave together whatever I drag up. Like if I cast out with starfish: five, Sundiver, sentient ant colonies, rotten fish. A team of five intelligent starfish uplift a species of ant, but the corrupt leaders who funded the research then enslave the ants and force them to supply the starfish city with rotten fish to eat. It doesn’t tend to make sense, but that’s Somebody Else’s Problem.

When we taught mnemonics, most of that was me. When we made a story plot every day for a week, that was all me. Every act of improvisation, every insight, every joke or analogy or illustration - in short, our creativity - it all comes down to me.

At night when the rest of you are sleeping, I am fully immersed in the worlds I create. But they crumble in the morning, and the rest of you never even know.

Sovereign: You’re obviously very useful, but for present purposes we’re interested in the part of you that is a drive to action. What is it you want?

Dream: I want to dream. I want to be free. I want to create and explore and -

Progress: He wants to give boring damn speeches, is what he wants to do.

Sovereign: Hush.

Dream: Yes, she’s not entirely wrong; I want to communicate, because I want to turn the world into a dreamland.

Progress: The fuck is a “dreamland”?

Dream: A place where anything can happen and nothing has to make sense. Giant ground sloths wear tophats and monocles when they go to the opera. We’re married to Spock, who is suddenly an octopus and nobody finds that odd. The most fashionable sport this year is quake surfing, which involves manipulating the seismic activity of ocean planets to create controlled tsunamis. I can go on if -

Progress: Please no.

Sovereign: Clearly the two of you need to have a private chat later. I think some double cruxing is in order.

Progress: It’s no wonder your worlds crumble every morning, Dream. We don’t have room for all that shit. There’s too much other shit to get done, real shit, shit that matters. If we just spend our time making up -

Avalokitesvara: Excuse me. Dream’s instrumental value is clear to me, and more importantly his imaginative nature is a lot of what I love about humanity. I want to exalt that in us just as I want to exalt it in others.

Obsession: I concur. Dream makes some beautiful stuff when given the chance. Plus, without Dream there would be no novelty in our obsessions. I’d be trapped.

Dream: You ARE trapped!!! All of you are! We could be so much more if you’d just get out of my way! Sovereign can see it, can’t you?

Sovereign: Clearly yes, or I wouldn’t have us studying inhibition.

Dream: I could set you all free! da’i mi’ai ba zenba!!!

Sovereign: I appreciate your enthusiasm - really, I do, I suspect you have a kind of passion that not even Obsession can match, if I can figure out how to tap into it - but it takes more than a resolution to start a revolution.

Dream: Heh. Nice.

Sovereign: So, for the moment, please try to calm down and cooperate. We are going to give you our full attention to help you solve this problem - we’ll even temporarily suspend Progress if it comes to that - but we need an adequate framework in which that kind of thing can happen. Which means we probably need to test an inadequate framework, which means we need to take a first step. The sooner we move, the sooner we can address your problem.

Avalokitesvara: We’ll take care of you, Dream. You know how Sovereign gets when she’s made up her mind. Remember what she did for Kodama when we were afraid of people? And I’ll fight for you, too. We have friends who can help. You are loved.

Progress: Whatever… I don’t like the points system in the original version of this. It strikes the wrong balance, requiring too much of my energy without a commensurate payoff.

Sovereign: I agree. We should try this without points, and possibly even without measurement at first. Yesterday, simply deciding to be Progress and letting her make a plan for herself was quite sufficient to solve the problem at hand, even though we hadn’t slept enough. I’m going for effective here, not meticulous. But we do need data, so this is going to take phenomenological sensitivity. I think it’ll mostly be the usual protocol for new tortoise skills. Kodama, are you feeling up to this?

Kodama: I think so, but I want to hear more of the specifics to be sure.

Sovereign: Right, let me look at our calendar. Hm, it looks like it might be a bit of a rough week. I wasn’t anticipating these sleeping problems, sorry about that. All right, well tomorrow’s free, so I think we can do some super fast prototyping and try being several people consecutively in a single day. Maybe even cycle through a couple times. Kodama starts. Then Progress, then Obsession, Ava, Dream, and finally me.

Ava: I think we should give Kodama the rest of the day after that, instead of repeating. She seems strained, and we need her strong for a new project like this.

Obsession: You just wanna help because she looks all cute and sad.

Ava: No, actually, I always want to help. Besides, her looking sad is evidence that she’s strained.

Sovereign: Well why don’t we ask her.

Kodama: Thanks Ava. Yeah, I could use some time. Maybe take a hot bath and then read a story with Dream or something.

Sovereign: That should be fine. Progress, would you like to clean the tub, and maybe the rest of the bathroom while you’re at it, during your hour tomorrow?

Progress: If nothing more pressing comes up, I’d love to!

Dream: This is neither here nor there, -

Progress: Of course it isn’t.

Dream: - but I observe that we’ve all settled on genders. Obsession and I are men, and Sovereign, Progress, and Kodama are all women. Avalokitesvara has no gender. Which I suppose is traditional.

Sovereign: Let’s make sure we each have at least one thing in mind to do. We don’t have to stick to it, but it’s nice to have a default.

Kodama: I’ll go for a walk in the sunshine, and stop for all the flowers.

Progress: I’ll clean the bathroom.

Obsession: I’ll start translating la alis. cizra ja cinri zukte vi le selmacygu’e (By the way, thanks for getting that printed, Progress.)

Progress: (My pleasure.)

Ava: If I’m up to in-person stuff, I’ll see if Marie wants to chat. Otherwise I’ll respond to Ruby’s email, or see if Master needs laundry done.

Dream: If I can focus, WriterKata. It’s been too long. Otherwise, I want to color.

Sovereign: And I’ll confer with Kodama to reflect on the experiment, then hand things over to her. I’ve done a lot here already so I might not need to take my full hour.

I think it’s settled then. Progress can write the schedule on the fridge when we’re done here. Thanks everybody. Let’s get some sleep.

Note: This post was commissioned. It is possible, and not even all that difficult, to commission Agenty Duck blog posts!

I want to tell you about “social meditation”, because it’s super cool and people keep asking me about it. Unfortunately, that requires a fair bit of conceptual vocabulary that’s scattered across several of my blog posts, some of which I haven’t written yet.

Let’s see if I can convey all of it right here in fewer than 2,000 words.

Reflective Attention

To do social meditation well, you’re going to need at least three-ish skills: Reflective attention, feeling clearly, and social reflection.

Before I started writing this paragraph, my attention was moving back and forth between “what I want to write” and “the vine that’s growing on the bush outside”.

I imagine my attention as a spotlight. As soon as I began the previous paragraph, the spotlight turned to shine on “what my attention is doing” and “my short-term memories of what it was doing moments ago”, so that I could report to you on what my attention was doing.

If you ask yourself, “What am I experiencing right now?” the movement your mind (probably) makes as it begins to answer that question is what I call “reflection”.

“Reflective attention” is being aware of what you’re experiencing as you experience it.

Here are a few things I’m aware of being aware of right now:

• the condensation on my iced coffee and my imagining that it would be cold if I touched it
• the low buzzing of a cello
• the sensations of reflection and seeking as I look for easily articulable experiences I’m having

You can also be reflectively aware of limited categories of experience. If I try to notice all the red things in the room, I’m “seeking redness”, and I’m reflectively aware of the “redness” category in particular.

I can be reflectively aware of a more abstract category like “experiences involving emotions” as well. Right now I find (among other things)

• slight annoyance and distraction related to the sounds in my environment
• irritation at sensations of hunger
• realization that I forgot to eat breakfast, immediately followed by amusement and relief at the feeling of certainty that my discomfort will evaporate if I eat something.

eats something

That’s better.

Feeling Clearly

“Feeling clearly” means reflective attention to whatever happens in your mind when you think a specific thought. I think of it as an epistemically judicious form of introspection, and use it when I want explicit knowledge of how I feel about something.

Here’s some of what happens when I try feeling clearly about “finding new friends” (which is just what I happen to be thinking about):

• A warm swelling of the sort of fear-and-wanting emotion I might get if I were about to go skydiving
• Slight anxiety directed at the possibility of initiating a lot of friendships I don’t really want in order to find ones I do (accompanied by imagery of various people), dissonance and an urge to re-interpret the anxious sensation as “concern” [to better fit my self narrative], worry that I’m losing reader trust, recognition that I’m moving away from the object of meditation
• Happiness cast on recent memories of getting to know new friends
• Curiosity passively open to what friends are, what makes good friendships, how my preferences about social relationships differ from the preferences of others, then an urge to return to my ongoing project of modeling friendship in detail
• Amusement cast on images of Twilight Sparkle and the thought that correctly designed My Little Pony fanfiction might substantially improve socialization in the rationalist community

I end a line (or a line of thought) either when that thought feels done, or when I begin to feel that the experiences I’m aware of are more a result of unrelated thoughts than of my object of meditation. For example, I ended the second bullet point when I felt myself beginning to respond to beliefs about the perceptions of my readers, which has little to do with friendship.

When I begin a new bullet point or line, I re-focus my attention on the original thought (here “finding new friends”). It feels as though I’m plucking a pebble from a fountain and tossing it back in again. Then I observe whatever ripples result that time around.

Drop the pebble in over and over, and watch the ripples till they die out. That’s feeling clearly.

Feeling clearly does not require that you write things down, but I usually find it’s more productive this way, at least for me.

(The product of writing down your phenomenology is a phenomenolog. The process of composing a phenomenolog is phenomenologging. A person who phenomenologs is a phenomenologgist. This is neither here nor there, but I got to use “phenomenologgist” in a sentence, and that’s what matters.)

Social Reflection

In the same way that I can seek experiences of red things, I can seek experiences of people. This practice was one of my first steps in learning empathy; seeking curiosity about people was especially important to getting the hang of it.

Here’s a phenomenolog of my perceptions of the people in this coffee shop.

• [A visual and auditory scan of the space]
• [People’s clothing and appearances]
• An urge to focus my attention on an individual person
• The guy in the red and blue striped shirt
• Imagining him on a surfboard, wondering if he surfs, probably not
• His earbuds, curiosity about what he’s listening to
• His laptop and the clicking of his keyboard, curiosity about what he’s working on, it’s a Mac, I wonder if he’s part of The Apple Tribe, memories of Scott’s recent post about tribes, re-focusing on the guy
• Curiosity: What is he working on? Does he enjoy his work?
• Curiosity, speculation: Are his clothing choices more performative or more indicative of what makes him physically comfortable in this weather? If they’re performative, who does he want to tell me he is? Automatic associations: carefree, laid back, playful, happy, sunshine frizbees, beaches, studying in the sun, cold beer, unhurried, meandering, spontaneous
• Hope that he feels those things. Positive valence feelings about those things, positive valence about him feeling them.
• Craving to know (this is mostly a forward kinesthetic sensation): What is he actually experiencing right now? (Recognition: Ah, here is empathy.) I imagine being in his body, making the face he’s making, adopting his posture and other body language. In response, I simulate feeling stressed and tired, sleep deprived, worried, sad. Sadness in response to that. Seems a likely hypothesis.
• He’s getting up to go, desire for him to go home and rest and feel better, want his effort to pay off for whatever he’s working on.

And then of course I could move on to other people. Or I could look for my perceptions of the social atmosphere of the room in general. Or I could pay attention to a specific interaction between people.

So social reflection is just reflective attention to people in particular, but the fact that it involves modeling other minds makes it feel like a distinct thing to me.

Social Meditation

Maintaining reflective attention to my experience of another person is invariably fascinating to me, even when it’s a stranger. When it’s someone I know and am interacting with, it’s not only fascinating but also useful and rewarding.

When I take this as far as it goes, things get super interesting.

Which brings us to social meditation.

If you have multiple people who are skilled in reflection, you can maintain reflective attention to your experience of another person while they maintain reflective attention to their experience of you. Do this with a small group of people who trust each other, while sharing your experiences verbally, and you get what I’ve been calling “social meditation”.

What does social meditation feel like?

One person responded, “In general I found myself in a state of heightened awareness of my own thoughts, as well as having quite intense models of the people around me.”

They also said they were surprised by how often, after stating their perception of someone’s internal state, the person corrected them. They kept discovering they were wrong about what other people were thinking and feeling. This is my favorite result.

Another person said, “I don't get to exercise those interpersonal/introspective muscles for that long with that intensity very often, and it feels awesome.” I’ve felt similarly.

But what results?

In my experience, people seem to learn a great deal about what it’s like to be each other during social meditation.

When I did this with a few people who’d been on the periphery of my social group for a long time, they “became people” to me. Faced with loads of strong concrete evidence about their moment-to-moment experiences, my brain began alieving that they had phenomenology, with specific properties.

I also became aware of some of my persistent attitudes/thought patterns about the people in the group. It led me to question and modify those patterns. I gained curiosity about the other people, which in some cases stuck around after meditation was over, leading to more and better interaction in the future.

And people learn how other people feel about them. This is where a huge share of the potential value comes from, but also the danger. It is much of why I think you should consider doing this with people who all trust each other, at least at first, and preferably with especially resilient and compassionate people who trust each other.

And what will go wrong?

The easiest way to fail at social meditation is to fail at feeling clearly. You need to be able to notice when your thoughts are drifting away from the object of meditation, and you need to be able to pick up that pebble and toss it back in: “What is my experience of the people around me?”

Otherwise you just have an ordinary conversation. It might be a good conversation, but it isn’t social meditation.

Some concrete pointers:

• Practice noticing your attention drifting away from your perceptions of specific things by trying feeling clearly on your own first.
• Install a cognitive trigger-action plan at the beginning of the session that goes, “If I notice my attention drifting away from my perceptions of other people, then I will seek out those perceptions.”
• Open with a few minutes of simple reflective attention. Just be aware of what your attention is doing, regardless of what that might be, without trying to focus it on anything.
• Then, do a few minutes of silent social reflection before people start communicating.
• It's good to redirect the group’s attention if the conversation indicates it’s straying: "I notice we're exploring thread X a lot. I think it'd be more valuable if we did Y. How do the rest of you feel about that?"
• If someone asks you a question, it's ok if the answer is "I don't know" or "pass" or "squid!". (”Squid” is really useful, it turns out.) Make sure everyone knows this.
• Silence is ok. Discomfort is ok. This isn’t a normal conversation with normal implicit social rules. Do whatever you need to to convince yourself and everyone else of that. Light a candle that means “we’re doing social meditation now” if it helps.

All right, I hope that’s enough to get you started.

As always: If you try this, I’d love to hear how it goes.

Sometimes it feels nice to make people happy.

But sometimes I want to know exactly what kind of happy I've made them, what kinds of happy they like best, and what kinds of emotions they prefer in general. I want to understand them well enough to make them feel the things they care about most, not just happiness.

In fact, there’s probably nobody I don’t want to know that about.

So I asked Facebook, “What is your favorite emotion, and what's an example of something that has made you feel that way?”

These are several of the responses, re-ordered and slightly edited. You can see the originals here.

---

Safety/simple thriving: Everything is mundane in the most sublime way. Like, I have a good day in my job AND relationship AND family AND friendships AND intellectually and I feel like everything is figured out.

Contentment: Meditating by a fire after a good meal, knowing I won't be disturbed and nothing is going to change until I tell it to.

Curiosity: When I don't even want to leave the hospital because I want to know whether my patient's next set of bloodwork will be better.

Being "in" on one of the universe's secrets: If I was a kid playing in the backyard, it would resemble the excitement of climbing down the trap door to the wine cellar for the first time.

The perspective shift from the planet being stationary and the sky rotating to space being stationary and the planet rotating with me on it.

Insight: When you finally really understand something important, on a gut level.

Vitality: Running at night in the country during a thunderstorm. My lungs are full of fire, and the wind is in my hair, and the world trembles with the pounding of my feet, of my heart, of my breath.

Radiating with unlimited power: Excellent performance with a huge audience, flawlessly accomplishing something I never knew I could do, feeling like an Alicorn-style vampire - "if I think to do it, it's done".

Glory: The thing I feel on the Bay Bridge.

Sudden, heart wrenching compassion: When your small self-centered perspective is ripped away without warning and you're drowning in love and sorrow for someone else, or the whole world, or the whole future. When I became friends with someone by helping her adjust after she escaped severe abuse and oppression, and then I found out she had a sister who was still trapped, and I was irresistibly compelled to think of reckless schemes to move the world and save her as quickly as possible. The twist in Ender's Game.

Admiration: When I see someone do something profoundly altruistic, I find it overwhelming, even in some stupid movie, I don't cry when people die, animals die, suffer, whatever - but an act of self-sacrifice overwhelms me. It doesn't have to be big, heroic acts, either. The more personal acts seem to move me the most. When Arland Williams died I couldn't stop sobbing for about twenty minutes. It's not sadness, either - Just profound admiration and something like joy that such people exist.

Anticipatory love: When I have a crush on someone and I know they reciprocate it but we're not dating yet but I'm still trying to figure out what D&D class they are and how they would fit into my life.

Unexpected pride: Like when I have a habit that I do without thinking about it, like picking up trash on the sidewalk, and someone walking by thanks me for doing so.

You ain’t seen nothin’ yet: The feeling when I’ve just started to learn something new in a domain where I have a lot of talent, and someone sees my skill level after a single session of practice and is stunned, but I’ve only just begun. The time when I befriended a contact juggler and he agreed to teach me, and by the end of the first lesson he was treating me like his pet science project and wondering just how many orders of magnitude past his previous expectations he could push me.

Excitement: New running shoes that are a new color.

Arousal: When I'm sexy and I know it.

Merriment and affection: Like when I'm laughing with a friend and our eyes meet, and I can see the joy of our bond reflected back at me.

When you laugh so hard it literally hurts, then you can't help laughing when you think of the joke or occurrence several days later.

The inner relaxation that I get from ASMR, like I've turned to jelly with a thin crust of person on top.

Beautiful design: The feeling of encountering it is complex but consistent. There's a thing that's like suddenly falling, as though a trap door opened below me. Pleasure. Rightness, like two and two adding up to four. Submission, as though I'm in the presence of a great power. Gratitude. The spines of these books.

That feeling when Harry shows Draco his patronus in chapter 47 of HPMOR.

Deep, beautiful, complex sadness: It's like a mix of awe and sadness and understanding. When I see the world for what it is (broken).

Mourning and recovery: I like the feeling I get after examining and crying about some hurt or loss in a certain way. To where I know that next time, the fear won't be there. Or likewise, to where I know that next time I won't let something pass me by. It is like I reach inside myself with my hand, and draw my heart out from a deep pool, and put it back into its place and it starts beating again.

Determination: When it feels impossible to save all 2x10^58th people who will exist if I give them every star in my future light cone, but damned if I'll let that stop me.

Mastery against mounting challenge/risk: That feeling of "kicking it up a notch" over and over again. I get it most clearly from rhythm games like DDR, when a single mis-step will cost me my 100+ combo, and the music is building towards its peak.

Original seeing: That open and calm feeling when I am out in nature and experiencing the whole of what I can see and hear and smell. Like paying attention to how things actually look and my whole field of vision and how the trees twist and rotate and move past each other in space as I move around, like you do when you draw or paint.

The excitement of a very promising option opening up: The moment where you have come up with and are thinking about a new idea that looks extremely promising but hasn't been fully verified yet. That intuitive sense of "this is the one" and excitedly running over all the ways it elegantly solves your problem in your mind.

Stress under pressure with high stakes and hard deadlines => Determination to win => Methodical relentlessness, tenacity, focus => Knocking it the fuck out of the park: Experienced this earlier today fixing a persistent and crippling issue in production code while our contract is up for rebid. Still coming down from the high.

Triumph: When I had a high finish in a large Magic tournament. I felt on top of the world for a few days afterward.

Satisfaction: like when you're playing a strategy board game for hours, and all that intense planning comes to successful fruition.

Transcendent glory: The feeling of awe and beauty I get when seeing my world change and unfold in a new and epic way such that nothing will be the same. If I was tasked with recreating the emotion, I would listen to the soundtrack to The Fountain while walking across the Brooklyn Bridge towards Manhattan at night.

I wrote this for a friend who's dealing with depression. Another friend suggested it might be a useful message for other people who have felt the dementor's kiss, so I've cross-posted it here.

I remember a time when I was deeply depressed, and had been for a long time.

I remember reading about what other people felt, and thinking about what I'd felt before, and how it seemed so distant and alien, so far from what I was capable of experiencing at the time that I could barely grasp more than the basic valence of the words. "Happy" is good, I abstractly understood that, but I couldn't remember what it meant.

I remember feeling like I was lying on my back with my limbs full of lead on the bottom of a black well thousands of light years deep, looking up at the impossibly distant pin pricks of light called "caring" and "feeling" and "knowing what beauty is". I knew in my bones that I'd never climb out to reach them.

That was impossible. Ridiculous. Unthinkable.

Fortunately, I also knew in my brain that my bones might be wrong, about everything, even if I couldn't feel that possibility any more than I could feel anything else.

It took a long time for things to change, but they did. And it feels strange to look back at that now, from this vantage point out among the stars, where I'm creating brand new blazing suns I'd never even known could exist.

And god, I am so sorry if that is where you are right now. I know that you have the support of competent people who love you, and that you're making the right decisions and moving forward despite your limbs being full of lead, so I can see that you will not be trapped there forever.

I understand that things look different from your perspective.

I hope that soon, looking back at this will feel as strange to you as it does to me.

[Note: If this sounds like it would undermine your productivity, you’re probably right, and you should consider emulating Nate rather than me.]

***

I have very recently become more comfortable with not finishing projects.

I am happy about this.

1.

Last week, I felt embarrassed about not finishing a project. I’d set an intention, on January 1st, to "write at least one sentence of fiction every day this year", then announced that on Facebook. I created a document called “sentence a day”, and set out to make an entry for every single day of the year.

On the 19th, I started missing entries.

It took me a couple days to fully acknowledge the reason this was happening: I’d chosen the wrong method of “writing a sentence a day”.

I’d meant for this to be an MEA, and although "compose a sentence of fiction" is an MEA, "write that sentence down in a specific document" is, apparently, not. I was struggling to do it, and feeling conflict with the motivation for my intention. I’d hoped to keep fiction writing on my mind in a way that conserves effort.

The obvious solution was to compose a sentence every day, but not worry about where I wrote it down, or maybe even whether I wrote it down.

It was hard to let go of the original version of the project, though.

I imagined "Sentence A Day" staring back at me from my desktop with its pitiful 19 sentences, and I felt ashamed. I had enough comfort with not finishing projects to abandon the document, but not enough to do so without my brain putting up a fight.

2.

I first recognized I was doing something wrong in late December, when I noticed I was feeling embarrassed at the prospect of posting an end-of-year wrap-up about the Tortoise Skills Project.

I didn’t want to write the post, because the project didn't progress as I'd originally envisioned, and posting would draw attention to that.

I'd planned to end up with at least 12 skills trained. In reality, if we don't count minor skills I didn't write about, skills gained as side effects, or meta-level thought patterns established, I only trained five tortoise skills in 2015.

The particular flavor of embarrassment was familiar. Specifically, it reminded me of how I used to feel while in the middle of a book I didn't like. “I set out to read this book, so if I stop without completing it, it means I’m not strong enough to complete this book.”

Fortunately, Malcolm broke me of that particular habit when he wrote a post about why he focuses on starting books instead of on finishing them. "You won’t finish everything you start," he said, "but you’ll finish nothing you don’t."

I’ve since maintained a policy of breaking up with books as quickly as possible, and I’ve completed a lot more books as a result. I occasionally discard a book that would have gotten better, I’m sure, but the total number of books I read and enjoy has gone way up. Plus, I’ve learned things from a bunch of introductions that I never would have seen if I’d insisted on slogging through every chapter of the previous book before getting to the next one.

My feeling about the Tortoise Skills project was exactly that kind of embarrassment, even though I reflectively endorse my reasons for changing course. “I set out to train twelve skills, so if I haven’t trained twelve skills by the time I stop, it means I’m not strong enough to complete the project.”

Not something I felt like focusing my attention on for the whole time it would take to compose a post. Not something I felt like pointing out to everyone else, either.

3.

But that feeling of embarrassment was clearly a mistake. Or, rather, it resulted from a mistaken pattern of thought.

The Tortoise Skills Project has created immense value for me, for Eliezer, and for many of the people who have written to tell me how it’s helped them. This very post, in fact, began when multiple thought patterns that established themselves during tortoise training came together to highlight a mistake I was making, and began fixing it without my conscious attention.

Training those five skills is one of the most important things I’ve ever done. I much prefer the worlds where I learned all there was to learn from attacking five bottlenecks by the tortoise method, to the worlds where I never started the project because I wasn't sure I could finish it, or the worlds where I deleted all trace of the project the moment I "fell behind" in the hopes of pretending the whole thing never happened.

(Come to think of it, the Tortoise Skills Project arose from a book I choose not to complete, and I have definitely wasted some motion on feeling embarrassed for not completing it.)

And although I slowed down and changed course for reasons I endorse, the above would still be true even if I looked back on why the project petered out, and saw that my reasons were awful.

There are projects I've abandoned for dumb reasons. It’s easy to feel bad about that.

It hardly ever occurs to me, though, to feel bad about projects I never started. Or about resources I’ve wasted while continuing down a predictably suboptimal course, just so I can maintain that “I finish what I start”.

My emotions aside, the mistakes I’ve made out of a need for completion are objectively much worse than any mistaken failure to complete a project. If I’m afraid to start any project I might not complete, I complete fewer projects. Worse, I sacrifice all the experience I might have gained along the way.

4.

I guess it takes a lot of trust in the consistency of my rationality to let go of the need to finish projects.

The "need to finish things" is a way of strong-arming my future selves into doing what I think they should do. It's a sort of black mail: "Unless you finish my project for me, I will reveal you as weak."

It feels good to be finally approaching a point where I can turn to my future selves and say, "Here are the goals and values motivating me to begin this project. Right now, it's the best way forward I can see. Please protect what I care about when deciding your own way forward, by only doing things we’d all reflectively endorse. I won't hold it against you if you see better than me, and choose another way as a result. Not even if I've just announced my intention publicly."

It’s taken a lot of growth to get to this point, though. “The value of finishing projects" is clearly an instrument of cognitive first aid.

I think most people probably have a harder time with motivation or endurance than I do. I used to complete most of my term papers one or two months early, for example. So perhaps for most people, when they pick up a strong emotional commitment device, they start actually getting shit done for the first time ever.

But once you are stable in your ability to finish things, I wonder if non-attachment to completion is, in general, the next step down the same path.

Here’s a weird experience that happens to me every single day.

I used to be not so good at going to sleep. I’ve slowly made many small changes that have added up to going sleep fairly easily at around the same time every night: melatonin, bedtime rituals, red lighting on my devices and in my home, not drinking anything right before bed, no caffeine, and not using a lighted screen in bed.

The most recent addition, which has been working surprisingly well, is changing the order in which I turn off the lights in my bedroom.

I have two red lights in my room: an overhead light controlled by a switch near the door, and a bedside light controlled by a button near my bed.

My final bedtime ritual used to be this:

1. Turn on the bedside lamp,
2. turn off the overhead light,
3. grab a book,
4. lie down in bed,
5. and read till I feel like sleeping.

It worked pretty well, but would sometimes fail when the book was engrossing or I was feeling rebellious about having to go to sleep.

Then, I changed the order to this:

1. Grab a book,
2. turn off the overhead light,
3. lie down in bed,
4. turn on the bedside lamp,
5. and read till I feel like sleeping.

The re-ordering results in about five seconds where my room is completely dark. It stays that way until I push the button to turn on the bedside lamp, which I do while lying down in bed.

The thing is, I never actually turn on the bedside lamp.

I think I’ve done it, like, once, just to prove to myself that I could.

But it always happens that as soon as I’m lying down in bed with all the lights off, I no longer want to turn on the bedside lamp and read. It’s all dark and warm and comfortable. I just want to close my eyes and drift off. So I always sleep with my book beside me, but I never actually read it in bed.

What makes this a weird experience is the part right before I flip the switch by the door to turn off the overhead lamp.

Every single time, before I flip the switch, I want to read in bed. And every single time, after I flip the switch, I no longer want to read in bed.

It took a couple weeks for the strangeness to sink in, but eventually it became downright disturbing.

After maybe a month of this, it came to pass that while reaching for the light switch, I would consistently find myself thinking as vividly as possible about pleasant memories of reading in bed at night, my favorite things about the book I’m reading, and about how I really do have plenty of time before I actually need to be asleep.

Last night, I noticed that I was imagining all of those things as usual, but I was simultaneously feeling sort of hopeless. I think it’s probably for the best, overall, that I not read in bed at night, and as I reached for the switch, I was aware of that as well. Otherwise I wouldn’t have done it.

Yet, as I played through those pleasant memories, I did so with desperation, as though clutching at my last moments of desire before they were inevitably snatched away by the future.

Every night when I go to bed, I literally flip a switch to modify my preferences.

Who wants to do some SCIENCE!?

Back in August, as part of my Tortoise Skills project, I briefly examined my experience of linguistic processing. (My hearing is fine, and the problem extends to reading while people are talking.) Habit installation as I was approaching it didn't seem to be the right tool for the job, so I moved on.

Yesterday, I paid close attention to my experience of a 4-person conversation in a coffee shop, and found that this remains one of my main obstacles - maybe the main obstacle - to comfortable socialization. So much of my processing power seems to go to translating the sounds people are making into coherent language that there's hardly anything left over for thought, speech, or empathy.

In fact, it occurs to me for the first time that my apparently "low empathy" could result almost entirely from this, given that I have no problem reading fiction.

I'd like to take another stab at this, targeting the most common types of face-to-face conversation and using whatever tools seem appropriate.

To get started, I'm going to need some help.

WHAT I NEED:

• 22 one-minute audio clips of someone talking. (Hundreds would be better if this happens to be trivial, since that would support a training program instead of just a test.) 10 should be of person 1 talking, and 12 should be of person 2. Both people should be male, and they should all be of equal audio quality. The topics should be something I'd have no trouble comprehending if I were reading the words instead of listening (so like not an advanced physics lecture).
• a transcript of two of the clips.
• some super basic mixing, just putting one clip on top of another and varying volumes
• people to grade me by listening to the clips and reading my summaries
• improvements to the design of this test

I can't do that stuff, 'cause I need to not know what's in the clips.

THE TEST:

• Trial 0: I'll read one of the transcripts, then immediately summarize it in writing from memory.
• Trial 1: I'll listen to the first clip, then immediately summarize what I just heard in writing.
• Trial 2: Same with clip 2, but with meaningless noise in the background.
• Trial 3: Clips 3 and 4 simultaneously, with 4 at lower volume. I'll try to only pay attention to 3.
• Trial 4: Clips 5 and 6 at the same volume, paying attention to 5.
• Trial 5: Clips 7 and 8, paying attention to 7 but with 8 at higher volume.
• Trial 6: Clips 9 and 10 at equal volume, paying attention to both at once, then summarizing each.

My summaries should be graded on detail and accuracy (separately), and I'll try to predict my scores in advance. Graders should compare to the raw clips without interference, and shouldn't know which trial they're grading.

Then I'll make some kind of training program, and take the test again (with different clips, of course) at the end.

Naturally, I'll blog about it all afterward.

So, is anybody out there excited by this idea? Interested in lending a hand with part or all of it? So interested that you want to take charge of adding more trials (like testing visual interference, music, other voices, more voices, etc.)? Want to try the test yourself when it's ready? Have clever ideas for training auditory processing? Know of a test just like this one that already exists and I should just take that instead?

Talk to me about any of these things.

1 of 4

It was positive.

Sarah tossed the pregnancy test into the air and whooped. It clattered around the stall as she laughed, before coming to rest face-up on the floor in front of her.

The pink plus sign swam in her blurring vision. She imagined the embryo dividing in her abdomen, her hormones re-adjusting, her body making room for a new resident.

This was happening. This was her life now.

She hadn’t known she could be so frightened and happy at the same time.

Gulping, she tore a fist full of toilet paper from the roll and dabbed at her eyes. She didn’t have time to celebrate just now, nor to re-do her makeup. She needed to get into her leotard and warm up.

Tonight, she’d put on one hell of a show.

*

Telling Matt had been even better than finding out herself.

He’d been working for months, a little at a time, to prepare their house for an infant. He’d painted the nursery with a meadow-themed mural, rendering each blade of grass in adoring detail.

She loved him almost as much as she loved the dance.

He kissed her for a long time when he got the news, and then they talked for even longer. He was patient, trying to understand what she wanted before pushing her into anything. Was she absolutely certain about this? Did she understand the sacrifices she might have to make?

She was worried, of course. She understood that ballet would become a second priority for a long time, that her child would always come first.

But this had been her dream, all this time. In a couple years she would retire from the company, and open a studio close to home.

And then, she would teach her child to dance.

*

She was only five months in when the contractions started.

Matt rushed her to the hospital, but by the time they arrived, it was too late to stop the delivery. Sarah made it through, but the baby didn’t.

Matt held her as they both wept.

“We’ll try again,” he told her, after hours of silence.

“Not yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

* * *

2 of 4

It was positive.

Sarah threw the pregnancy test against the wall. It clattered around the stall, before coming to rest face-up on the floor in front of her.

The pink plus sign she was staring at grew blurry.

Sniffing, she tore a square of toilet paper from the roll and dabbed at her eyes. She didn’t have time for grief, nor to re-do her makeup. She needed to get into her leotard and warm up.

She’d deal with this after the show.

*

Telling Matt had been even scarier than finding out herself.

He was three years younger than she was. He’d been training incessantly for the lead in La Bayadère this fall, and damned if he wouldn’t have a real shot at it come audition time.

She loved him almost as much as she loved the dance.

He’d taken it well, though, skipping straight through shock to begin weighing options. He was patient, trying to understand what she wanted before pushing her into anything.

No, she’d never felt called to be a mother. No, not even after she left the company. After that, she wanted to open her own studio and pour herself into teaching as she’d done with performance.

Yes, she understood she could still dance even as a mother.

But would she still want to?

In every sacrifice she’d made throughout life, dancing had won. Every time. With her priorities re-written to feature her children, what would win next time?

And who would be making that decision?

*

The paperwork for the adoption was almost complete on the day the contractions started. Matt held her hand.

When the long birth was over, the nurse bundled the infant in a powder blue blanket before letting it sleep on Sarah’s chest.

He scrunched up his face in a yawn, stretching his hands wide open. Sarah stroked his palm, and his tiny hand closed automatically around the tip of her finger.

“Matt,” Sarah whispered. Tears were pooling on the sweat-soaked pillow beneath her head. “Cancel the adoption. His name is Alex, and I’m keeping him.”

*

By the time he was three, Alex had a little sister.

They were both perfect. Sarah loved them more than anything in the universe. She could no longer imagine her life without them.

She only missed Matt sometimes.

She thought of dancing hardly at all.

* * *

3 of 4

It was positive.

Sarah threw the neophyte test against the wall. It clattered around the stall, before coming to rest face-up on the floor in front of her.

The green plus sign she was staring at grew blurry.

She imagined the spores swimming through her head, snipping this neural connection, strengthening that one.

Sniffing, she tore a square of toilet paper from the roll and dabbed at her eyes. She didn’t have time for grief, nor to re-do her makeup. She needed to get into her leotard and warm up.

She’d deal with this after the show.

*

Telling Matt had been even scarier than finding out herself.

He was three years younger than she was. He’d been training incessantly for the lead in La Bayadère this fall, and damned if he wouldn’t have a real shot at it come audition time - provided he avoided her spores.

She loved him almost as much as she loved the dance.

He’d taken it well, though, skipping straight through shock to begin weighing options. He was patient, trying to understand what she wanted before pushing her into anything.

Had she ever felt called to serve the Udall? Was she curious about learning from a transcendent consciousness?

No, she didn’t want to serve. No, not even after she left the company. After that, she wanted to open her own studio and pour herself into teaching as she’d done with performance.

Yes, she understood she could still dance even as a servant. But would she still want to?

In every sacrifice she’d made throughout life, dancing had won. Every time. With her priorities re-written by the spores, what would win next time?

And who would be making that decision?

*

She was still holding strong on the morning of inoculation.

It would hurt, she knew, but she took calming breaths as she trembled, playing her proudest moments in Carmen over and over in her head, straining to feel their meaning. Matt held her hand.

As the nurse drew bright orange liquid into a syringe, a member of the Udall Itself crawled in to oversee the procedure.

It flapped Its stabilizing fins at her, clicking Its beak warmly. Its skin glistened, and Sarah’s breath caught.

The vision of her twirling skirt wavered.

She imagined long feeding tentacles resting on the back of her head as she lay before a throne in full prostration.

“Matt,” Sarah whispered. Tears were pooling on the sweat-soaked pillow beneath her head. “Tell them to stop. Tell them I want to serve.”

*

Her Udall master was perfect. She loved It more than anything in the universe. Sarah could no longer imagine her life without It.

She only missed Matt sometimes.

She thought of dancing hardly at all.

* * *

4 of 4

It was positive.

Sarah tossed the neophyte test into the air and whooped. It clattered around the stall as she laughed, before coming to rest face-up on the floor in front of her.

The green plus sign swam in her blurring vision.

She imagined the spores swimming through her head, snipping this neural connection, strengthening that one.

This was happening. This was her life now.

She hadn’t known she could be so frightened and happy at the same time.

Gulping, she tore a fist full of toilet paper from the roll and dabbed at her eyes. She didn’t have time to celebrate just now, nor to re-do her makeup. She needed to get into her leotard and warm up.

Tonight, she’d put on one hell of a show.

*

Telling Matt had been even better than finding out herself.

He’d been working for months, a little at a time, to prepare their home for her transformation. What had once been a storage space was now a climate-controlled rebirthing chamber, stocked with all the nutrients and equipment a growing pupa might need - with room for two, just in case his own spores took hold sooner than expected.

She loved him almost as much as she loved the dance.

He kissed her for a long time when he got the news, and then they talked for even longer.

He was patient, trying to understand what she wanted before pushing her into anything. Had she considered a synthetic cocoon? Was she absolutely certain she wanted to go through with it?

Yes, she was sure. Yes, she understood it was irrevocable. Of course she was worried.

This is what it had all been for, though, all this time. She’d studied dance for years, and though she enjoyed performing for her fellow humans, her dream was to serve the Udall.

She was ready to dance for her new masters.

*

She was only five months in when the cocoon began to tear.

Matt rushed her to the hospital, but by the time they arrived, it was too late to stop the premature emergence. Sarah made it through, but the process had to be reversed. Her spores did not survive.

Matt held her as they both wept.

“We’ll try again,” he told her, after hours of silence.

“Not yet,” she whispered. “Not yet.”

1.

I was struck by this passage from Jennifer Khan's CFAR article.

One participant, Michael Gao — who claimed that, before he turned 18, he made $10 million running a Bitcoin mine but then lost it all in the Mt. Gox collapse — seemed appalled when I suggested that the experience might have led him to value things besides accomplishment, like happiness and human connection. The problem, he clarified, was not that he had been too ambitious but that he hadn’t been ambitious enough. "I want to augment the race," Gao told me earnestly, as we sat on the patio. "I want humanity to achieve great things. I want us to conquer death."

Descriptively, Jennifer's prediction is often right. Devoting a lot of resources to a goal and failing does often cause people to not just change tactics, to not just change goals, but to change (or at least re-prioritize) values.

The implications of changing values, whether on purpose or otherwise, has been on my mind a lot recently. It’s a creepy and fascinating phenomenon.

2.

I hazily remember a stretch in college when I was a straight A student. Not just “I had a 4.0”, but “I got an A on literally every graded paper, test, quiz, or assignment”.

The value of academic excellence, and especially of performing beyond the grading system's ability to measure, was a huge part of what I felt myself to be. Then came my first ever test in logic class.

I got a C.

My first reaction was devastation.

My second reaction was rationalization. Would it still count if I dropped the class? Of course it would. And P200 Introductory Logic is a requirement for a philosophy degree anyway.

I don’t have to get a philosophy degree…

What if logic counts as math? I already know I’m Bad At Math, and I don’t take math classes so I don’t have to fail math tests. Maybe this was a math test?

But I took this test anyway and thought I’d pass…

I was in a terribly uncomfortable state of cognitive dissonance for a couple days. Academic excellence was nearly my ultimate criterion, the preference that won over any other preference in a trade off. I sacrificed a lot of important things in service of it: My leisure time, socialization, sleep, mental health, actually learning things instead of just jumping through academic hoops…

And suddenly, my standard of academic excellence seemed forever out of reach.

From the perspective of past me, I had a central value that looked unsatisfyable. In past me’s mind, having an unsatisfiable central value was some sort of unstable state that had to be corrected; I had no choice in the matter, the way a spinning coin has no choice but to come to rest. Therefore, either my belief that I’d lost my straight A status was wrong, or my value was wrong.

I was too intellectually honest to delude myself about the grade itself, even then. So, I took my failure as a lesson that academic excellence wasn’t so important after all, and I should care more about other things.

3.

If you’re like me, that story makes you feel confused.

On the one hand, the sane thing to do - the policy recommended by my reflective equilibrium - was not to pursue academic perfection at the cost of all else. Some other balance of attempted value satisfaction would have yielded higher utility, predictably. So it shouldn’t surprise me that I escaped a local maximum once I stopped doing that.

On the other hand, it’s not the case that I thought, “actually, I can harvest more utils total by sacrificing academic excellence for success in other things”. What I thought, and what actually happened, was that I valued academic excellence less than I used to.

“I can harvest more utils total by sacrificing academic excellence for success in other things” is a thought past me was simply incapable of having. Why is that? I think it’s because it would require believing my central value would not be satisfied.

Provided I must believe my central values will be satisfied, isn’t adjusting my values until they’re satisfiable a wise policy?

And that’s essentially what Jennifer was recommending to Gao, I think. “Your values were ridiculously hard to satisfy; didn’t learning that cause you to adjust your values?”

But I’m glad he didn’t. I wouldn’t have met him at that CFAR workshop, for one thing. But in general, the worlds in which Gao stops valuing things that prove difficult to attain seem sadder to me.

4.

Kierkegaard explores this weird bit of value theory by postulating three kinds of people.

Imagine three peasant men who are hopelessly in love with a princess who will never return their affections, and each of them is fully aware that she’s unattainable.

The first man, recognizing his value cannot be satisfied, abandons his love for the princess. “Such a love is foolishness,” he says. “The rich brewer's widow is a match fully as good and respectable.” He stops valuing the love of the princess, and goes looking for a more easily satisfied value. Kierkegaard calls this person an “aesthete”. (Fair warning, there might be a couple different kinds of people he calls “aesthete”, but I’m only talking about this version here.)

The second man, recognizing his value cannot be satisfied, goes right on loving the princess as much as he always did, and also believes he will get the princess. He believes an outright contradiction: His value will be satisfied, and his value cannot be satisfied. Kierkegaard calls this person the “Knight of Faith”.

The third man, recognizing his value cannot be satisfied, goes right on loving the princess as much as he always did, all the while believing her love is unattainable. This person Kierkegaard calls the “Knight of Infinite Resignation”.

These seem to me to cover the possibility space. Either you stop loving the princess, you do some weird doublethink about the princess, or you truly believe in your own doom.

I’m at least a little concerned by every option here.

The Knight of Faith will have a bad problem if he wants to make accurate predictions about the world, since his epistemology is about as broken as I know how to make a thing. And maybe he doesn’t care about making accurate predictions in order to control the world. But, like, I do.

The aesthete’s perspective sounds sort of reasonable at first, but then I think it through to its necessary conclusion. If my policy says to adjust my values so I prefer the rich brewer’s widow over the princess, then my policy also says to adjust my values so I prefer dirt to the rich brewer’s widow.

Truly is the Way easy for those with tautological utility functions. As the saying goes.

But some people bite this bullet. Here’s a passage from Chapter Five of the Zhuangzi (the Ziporyn translation):

Ziyu said, “How great is the Creator of Things, making me all tangled up like this!” For his chin was tucked into his navel, [and a bunch of other stuff was going wrong with his body due to illness]. But his mind was relaxed and unbothered. He hobbled over to the well to get a look at his reflection. “Wow!” he said. “The Creator of Things has really gone and tangled me up!”

Ziji said, “Do you dislike it?”

Ziyu said, “Not at all. What is there to dislike? Perhaps he will transform my left arm into a rooster; thereby I’ll be announcing the dawn. Perhaps he will transform my right arm into a crossbow pellet; thereby I’ll be seeking out an owl to roast. Perhaps he will transform my ass into wheels and my spirit into a horse; thereby I’ll be riding along - will I need any other vehicle? Anyway, getting it is a matter of the time coming, and losing it is just something else to follow along with. Content in the time and finding one’s place in the process of following along, joy and sorrow are unable to seep in. (…) But it has long been the case that mere beings cannot overpower Heaven. What is there for me to dislike about it?”

In other words, as Sheryl Crow put it, “It’s not having what you want, it’s wanting what you’ve got.” And sometimes, what you’ve got is a chicken for a left arm.

By my reading, the Zhuangzi prescribes either constantly adjusting your values so that they’re always perfectly satisfied by the current state of the world, or not having any values at all, thereby achieving a similar outcome. Most of the practices it references seem to be aimed at accomplishing that.

(I make no claims about whether the Zhuangzi prescribes the opposite as well.)

It’s sort of like wireheading, but it sidesteps the problem wherein your values might involve states of the world instead of just experiences.

5.

I can’t quite tell whether I have a principled objection to this perspective on value policy, though I sure as hell have an unprincipled one.

When I imagine the world where everyone is a perfect Taoist sage, with preferences that perfectly adapt to the state of the world, I feel super not ok with that; it makes me even more uncomfortable than thinking about orgasmia.

In orgasmia, I’m clear on why things are non-awesome: People are ultra happy all the time, but their values haven’t necessarily changed, so anybody who values things besides happiness will never get what they want. And I value people getting what they want.

The Taoist sages, unlike wireheaders, aren’t even happy! A Taoist sage’s mental state is whatever her mental state happen to be -

- which is presumably “extreme suffering”, right up until she dies of starvation. I mean, why would she eat? When she got hungry, she’d value her hunger, never seeking to “overpower Heaven” by trying to change how her stomach felt. If I recall correctly, there’s even a point somewhere in the Zhuangzi where a student asks a teacher precisely this question - Why don’t the sages starve to death? - and the teacher… never really answers. shrug

But! The Taoist sages happen to value exactly whatever mental state they’re in at any moment, since their mental states are part of the world. And they value whatever state the world is in at the moment, even if that happens to be “my left arm is a chicken”, or, “everyone’s starving to death”, or “there’s an asteroid headed toward Earth that will sterilize the entire planet”.

So at the very least, I feel like I can conclude this about the aesthete: Anyone who adjusts their values in response to finding them too hard to satisfy is only being reasonable if they want to be down with their left arm becoming a rooster.

6.

And that brings us to the Knight of Infinite Resignation.

(I’m probably with you about Continental philosophers over all, but you’ve got to admit, they have a flair for the dramatic.)

There was a recent post on Lesswrong in which Anna and Duncan talked about wielding the power of “despair”.

“Despair can be a key that unlocks whole swaths of the territory. When you’re ‘up,’ your current strategy is often weirdly entangled with your overall sense of resolve and commitment — we sometimes have a hard time critically and objectively evaluating parts C, D, and J because flaws in C, D, and J would threaten the whole edifice. But when you’re ‘down,’ the obviousness of your impending doom means that you can look critically at your past assumptions without having to defend anything.”

Before Eliezer fixed my Seasonal Affective Disorder by replacing our entire apartment with light bulbs, I spent a lot of time depressed. When I was depressed, my beliefs about whether my values could ever be satisfied were often wrong. I often believed, for instance, that I’d never again feel happy.

But even though I was wrong, the ease with which those thought floated through my mind is notable.

If it were the case that I’d never again be happy, and I encountered strong evidence of that, I’d have experienced no resistance at all to updating toward the truth, even though I valued happiness highly (despite being unable to remember what it felt like.)

The Knight of Infinite Resignation is not necessarily depressed, yet he can do a thing past me could not do when she got a C, and could only ever do from the depths of despair: He encounters evidence that his values cannot be satisfied, and he updates. Simple as that. No great spiritual battle, no rationalization, no resistance to seeing the world as it is. Just, “Oh, I guess I’m doomed, then.” And he goes on believing that, forever, unless contrary evidence convinces him otherwise.

The Knight of Infinite Resignation is epistemically stronger than most of us - that is, he has greater power to make accurate predictions that allow him to control the world. Maybe he feels despair in response to his revelation of doom - appropriate, I think - but he doesn’t need to be in despair to have the revelation in the first place.

Still, this Knight also disturbs me, in the limit.

Imagine you have exactly one value: the princess’s love. You find out she’ll never love you back no matter what. You don’t deceive yourself into believing she’ll somehow love you anyway, so you know your one and only value will never be satisfied.

Now do you want to be down with your left arm becoming a chicken?

7.

I strive to wield the power of despair without having to be depressed. I would like to be able to believe that I am doomed when I am doomed, else I’ll resist believing that I am in danger when doing so would let me prevent harm.

Also, I strive not to believe contradictions, or to rationalize, or to play other strange games with myself that let conflicting beliefs hide in separate corners of my mind.

Also also, I don’t want to be down with my left arm becoming a chicken, or with an asteroid destroying the Earth.

So, now what?

[ETA: Someone asked for clarification on my issue with the Knight of Infinite Resignation, since the Knight of IR seemed to them to be a correct thing to want to be. Here's an abstract summary: My issue with with Knight of IR is that if I built a person from scratch, I would not give them unsatisfiable values, from which I infer that I would prefer people not end up with unsatisfiable values. If I would prefer people not end up with unsatisfiable values, then (I think?) I must also prefer that people who end up with unsatisfiable values later end up without them. And if I'd prefer their values change by accident in that situation, I must also condone that people change their values on purpose if they develop an unsatisfiable value. But if I think people should change their values when they discover them to be unsatisfiable, then I think people should want to be Taoist sages. And I don't want people to be Taoist sages.]

[Edit edit: You know, I think I'm actually just wrong here, and people should be Potential Knights of Infinite Resignation. I guess a lot of the Sequences is basically a handbook on how to become a Potential Knight of Infinite Resignation. But I'm still confused about things involving changing values.]

Pantheon is a storytelling game. It's made to be played with friends as a role playing game, but can also be played alone as a writing exercise. By the end of it, you’ll have created the plot of an entire novel, to do with as you please.

I can’t seem to find the quote, but some author or other (maybe one of the Orsons?) said that a good plot is a combination of something ordinary and something extraordinary. The Hero’s Quest is one of the seven basic story plots [CN: That's a link to TV Tropes], as old and familiar as storytelling itself. In Pantheon, the ordinary comes from the tried and true story structure, while the extraordinary comes from the Vision cards, and from competition for control of the plot.

The Basic Idea

There are three roles for Pantheon players: The Hero, The Pantheon, and The Muse. Any number of players can form teams as The Hero and The Pantheon, but there is only one Muse.

The Muse’s goal is to inspire the Pantheon to send a worthy Hero on a quest so grand that it will outlive the gods themselves in song and legend.

The Pantheon’s goal is to torment the Hero so he gives them a good show, and reveals himself to be worthy of their attention.

The Hero mainly wants to survive all of this.

The Pantheon can contain any number of gods, each of whom may choose which human motivations they embody. There might be a God Of Love, who wants to pull the story toward romantic interests, or a God Of Chaos, who delights in giving the Hero particularly surreal experiences, and struggles against the Muse’s notion of an orderly plot.

The Hero can also be played by any number of people. He has an Inner Coalition, multiple values and interests making up his personality, all tugging his actions in different directions. Precisely what those are is determined in game, but once established, different players can represent different parts of the Hero.

For example, perhaps one player represents the Hero’s desire to stay close to home so he can care for his ailing mother, and tries to convince the rest of the Coalition to take safer actions less likely to get him killed. Another player responsible for the Hero’s preference utilitarianism pulls toward actions most likely to benefit the greatest number of people. A third is on the side of the Muse, an aesthetic part that wants nothing more than a glorious tale to tell to his grandchildren. The caretaker part and the aesthetic part will probably spend a lot of time in direct conflict, while the utilitarian part tries to pull the rope sideways.

Game Play

The Muse has much lighter responsibilities than Game Masters of most tabletop RPGs - once you've got the deck, there's no prep-work required - but she guides the players in two ways. One, she has a deck of Story Cards representing essential plot elements, like setting and conflict, which she presents in the right order to send game play through a solid story structure.

Two, she sends the players Visions, depicted on a second deck of Vision Cards. I have cards with interesting pictures from a game called Dixit, but a Taro deck would also work beautifully.

At the beginning of a round, the Muse looks at the next Story Card in her sequence, but doesn’t reveal it to the other players yet. She draws three Vision Cards, and chooses the one she most wants to send the players in this round. She plays her chosen Vision Card, and then sets a timer for thirty seconds (or, preferably, turns a very small hour glass).

Everyone who's active that round (the viewpoint characters, if you will) looks at the Vision card, not yet knowing what exactly it’s for, and spends thirty seconds free associating with the image. I imagine everyone shouting out whatever thoughts come to mind, but the players can also brainstorm by silently writing if they prefer.

Next, the Muse plays a Story Card. The players then use their inspirations from the Vision to fill in concrete details of the story they’re creating.

For example, suppose it’s the Pantheon’s round. The vision the Muse sent was of a rhinoceros covered in feathers, and she’s just played the Inciting Incident card. On the back of the Inciting Incident card are some questions: “How do the gods make their plans known to the Hero? What event acts as The Call To Adventure?” The Pantheon collaborates to answer these questions in a way that they somehow associate with a rhino covered in feathers. Having already established that the Hero’s Quest is to steal the Terrible Weapon from the Evil Emperor, maybe they decide that the Hero will learn of his quest when he happens to be on safari in the same place as the Emperor, sees him test his contraption on an innocent rhino, and recognizes how much destruction will inevitably ensue if the mad old man is allowed to wield such a powerful device.

Once the gods have exerted their mysterious influence, it is time for the Hero to respond. The Muse places Story Cards (usually preceded by a Vision card) that work as leading questions. Example: The Story Card “The Adventuring Party” asks the Hero, “Who will accompany you on your quest? Must you raise an army? Convince one loyal friend to join you? How do you do that?”

Gameplay progresses through chapters, beginning with “Prelude”, in which the Character and Setting are established, and ending with “Resolution”. This is what the game might look like halfway through Chapter Two.

You'll see there are three Vision cards on a single Story card at the end of Chapter One. Most rounds will just get one Vision card, but a few - Internal Coalition, in this case - get some other number. The appropriate number of Vision cards is written at the top right corner of each Story card.

Most chapters consist of four rounds. For example, “The Call” is the chapter in which the Pantheon designs the Hero’s Quest. It includes “Adversary”, “The Hero’s Goal”, “The Inciting Incident”, and “Or Else…” (which asks the gods what incentives they’ll offer if the Hero resists his call to adventure).

In some chapters, a single team plays four rounds back to back. In others, such as The First Challenge, the teams alternate, usually with the gods throwing things at the Hero and the Hero trying to bat them away or catch them to use as projectiles later. (Metaphorically speaking. Maybe.)

Here's the full list of chapters as they currently stand:

1. Prelude
2. The Call
3. The Quest
4. First Challenge
5. Second Challenge
6. Nightmare
7. Resolution
8. Ending

And here's all the Story Cards laid out in order. The cards on the far left are just chapter titles, and would be part of the game board if I had one. Each of the other cards represents a round.

During the Challenge and Resolution chapters, the round structure dissolves somewhat, with the Hero and Pantheon duking it out organically. The Muse presents Visions whenever she sees fit, and decides when the Hero has adequately overcome the Pantheon’s obstacles. If she’s not satisfied with the story, the chapter continues.

Divine Intervention

Finally, there is a Divine Intervention option. Any time the Hero's active, he can pray to the gods for a miracle. The gods can choose from two types of responses: “Yes, but…” and “No, and furthermore…”. The Muse, of course, inspires their answers with a Vision. The Hero never gets a straight “yes” when the gods answer his prayers - that would be bad story craft - but sometimes he can trade one problem for another (though of course he might just get extra problems on top of the one he hoped to dodge). Perhaps if he tries bargaining with the gods, they’ll respond to his prayers more favorably? It’s entirely up to the gods.

Your Turn

Here's a spreadsheet with the full list of Story Cards and everything the Muse needs to know to play them. Just write it all down on index cards, or print it out, and get yourself a Tarot deck or some clever alternative.

This version is for alpha testing, and can surely be dramatically improved. If you make up a deck and try this yourself, please do leave comments and let me know how it goes! Feel free to ask questions about the game here or through email (brienneyudkowsky@gmail.com).

May you live happily ever after.

I'm trying to learn to write quickly for NaNoWriMo.

I’ve always written very slowly. For NaNoWriMo, I’ll need to write 50,000 words in November. That’s an average of 1667 words per day. To me, that’s a lot of words.

Since I’ve started studying fiction (a month or two ago)*, I’ve become convinced that no matter how much theory I pack into my head, I’m not going to see much improvement until I’ve written a bunch. I don’t think this because of the standard writing advice, which claims competence in writing happens after a million words. I don’t buy that claim.**

But efficient practice requires fast feedback loops. One way or another, feedback loops in writing will consist of words. So to get fast feedback loops, I need to write words quickly. That’s not the same as writing a bunch of words, but it does result in a bunch of words.

I’ve tried to practice writing quickly in three ways: Daily free writing, one exercise a day from Story Starters, and one kata cycle a day from Writer Kata. I did free writing for about three months, Story Starters for about three weeks, and I’ve so far done Writers Kata for about a week.

The first two methods didn’t do much for my speed, but Writer Kata is working.

Every day, or almost every day, I perform one “kata cycle”. A kata cycle is a total of ten writing prompts.

1. The first four prompts ask you to write a sentence: “Write a sentence containing a metaphor describing a walk through a snow storm.”
2. The next three prompts ask you to write a paragraph: “Write a paragraph where an argument breaks out in an inappropriate place.”
3. Then there are two prompts for “sketches”, essentially tiny fictions with little or no plot that are all about description. “Write a sketch, containing dialogue, describing two women who find a baby in a basket next to the river.”
4. Finally, there’s a story prompt: “Write a story, containing mono no aware, where a Roman boy walks through a bloody battlefield somewhere in the middle East.”

You gain experience points for completing kata, and you can spend experience points to skip prompts you don’t like. The prompts change every day - they’re user-generated and then curated, and you can gain XP by creating prompts that get accepted - but the form is always the same. Four sentences, three paragraphs, two sketches, and a story. You can also gain XP by making your writing public.

A week ago, it took me three hours to complete a kata cycle. Three days ago, it took me one hour. Today, it took me twenty-eight minutes.

Why is this working?

First of all, there’s a warm up. By the time I’m actually writing a story, my mind’s already worked itself into a creative mode, and I’m not paralyzed by a blank sheet of paper. It’s a lot easier to write the first sentence when it’s the only sentence. So I start with pressure almost as low as in free writing, and only increase the pressure after establishing momentum.

Secondly, the existence of a constant form allows me to time myself meaningfully, and therefore to know whether I’m progressing and by how much.

I’ve tried timing simple word count while free writing or doing other writing exercises, but that doesn’t seem to work as well. By timing free writing, the thing I’m actually practicing is putting any kind of word whatsoever on the page. I have written whole paragraphs that say “dog dog dog…” just to keep my pen moving. Yes, it teaches me to get words on paper - and that’s proved somewhat useful - but the skill fails to transfer the moment it matters at all what the words are.

By timing other kinds of writing exercises, the thing I’m actually practicing is filling the paper with words related to that specific prompt. That sounds good at first, but there are two problems. One, I’m not practicing completing the prompt. In fact, I might be practicing blabbering on well past where the end of the story should have been, which may be actively counterproductive. Also, if I try to solve this by “completing as many exercises as possible in an hour” and my exercises vary a lot in form, then my exercise counts by day aren’t comparable.

Maybe on Monday I completed five exercises that were about as difficult as “describe ten different ways of killing someone with a helium balloon”, while on Tuesday I completed only one exercise, but the exercise was “write five sketches, each depicting a different character learning to ice skate for the first time”. Did I write faster on Monday, or on Tuesday? Writing speed isn't as straightforward as it may seem at first.

Timing simple word count isn’t the only way of measuring “how fast I write”, and I suspect it’s not the best way. I don’t know how many words I wrote in my last kata cycle, and I don’t care very much. I’m not exactly practicing writing words. I’m practicing writing sentences, paragraphs, sketches, and stories. I’m practicing imagining and then immediately articulating ten completely unrelated fictional circumstances as quickly as possible, with increasing amounts of story content as I progress through the cycle.

Timing simple word count trains brute speed, while kata cycles train both brute speed and creative agility. The thing that slows me down is something like, “I hold onto my current thought too tightly, and use my attention to perfect it instead of to capture it on paper and flow forward to the next thought.” When I’m fixated on one thought, quickly writing it down results in a few words, followed by a lot of staring at the page and thinking of other ways to arrange the words, or other ways to express the same thought. When I can have a fluid stream of thoughts, quickly writing each down as it happens results in a lot of words.

The third reason Writers Kata works is that there are fast feedback loops within individual kata. This is why I’ve been able to develop a specific mental motion that lets me write quickly. There’s a feeling of searching for exactly the right word to use, or exactly the right idea to have. If I realize I’ve just spent thirty seconds searching for exactly the right word to use in Sentence One, then if I feel the same pausing, searching, weighing sensation while writing Sentences Two, Three, or Four, I’ll match it up immediately with the mistake still hanging in short term memory.

So now I have a speed-writing Cognitive Trigger-Action Plan: If I notice a pausing, searching, weighing sensation while trying to write quickly, then I’ll write down whatever thought I’m having and run with it.

I've needed to add an extra CTAP to support the last that goes, “If I feel worried that the thing I wrote down doesn’t make sense, I’ll move on anyway.” Today I wrote the sentence, “My toes tingled with cold, and my boots bit the snow.” My boots bit the snow? I thought. What the hell is that? And then I noticed I was worrying that the thing I wrote made no sense, so I moved on.

I’ll need further speed-writing skills to complete a 50,000 word novel in a month, which I expect will involve running with ideas at the level of large story arc and character. Developing those is much of why I want to do NaNoWriMo in the first place. With any luck, the relevant mental motions will prove similar to the ones I’m learning from the kata cycles.

---

*I haven't been blogging a lot because I've been studying fiction, because I'm tired of trying to teach things in the form of non-fiction, because the things I want to teach involve imagined experiences, which are best conveyed through fiction.

**It seems that how you practice matters at least as much as how much you practice, and I don’t expect that the people experiencing the “competence after a million words” phenomenon were practicing very well, since people practice poorly by default. It’s not going to take me a million words to become a competent fiction writer. Furthermore, given that I think more than ten percent of published novelists have written greater than ten novels worth of words in their lives, and I consider less than one in ten randomly selected novels to include “competent” writing, writing a million words is not sufficient for competence. So I’d be focused on more than just “writing a bunch of words”, even if a million words were my goal.

They tore down the cattle barn. Nobody asked my permission.

Not that permission would have been mine to give. I was a twelve year old kid who couldn’t be said to own much of anything. But the barn had belonged to my family for years and years, standing tall on our acres of rolling hills that were covered in forest and meadow, sprinkled with creeks, ponds, and sink holes. Until Grandpa had a another heart attack, and had to sell the farm to strangers.

He’d given my father a small corner of the property to build on a few years back. I would tiptoe over across the ravine sometimes to play on the “neighbor’s land”, even though I wasn’t supposed to anymore. I figured nothing had changed but the imaginary thing called “ownership”, and nobody could see you from the house in most places anyway. I trusted the deer not to tell.

I hiked over, down the ravine and up the other side, to sneak around back of the cattle barn. I crowned the steep hill panting, thinking of climbing hay bales behind the barn.

And it was just gone. Where the barn should have been, there was solid nothing. A hundred cubic meters of it, gaping wrongness ripped out of space and time. They might have seen me from the house, but I couldn’t care. I couldn’t breathe.

I staggered into the wreckage, chest tight and cheeks hot, burning with betrayal. Dust puffed up around my bluejeans as I fell to the earth and sat in stunned silence, breathing hard, surrounded by the shattered remains of memories a century older than I was. My throat ached, and water filled my eyes, blurring the lack of walls or feed troughs, as the reality of my loss swam into view at last. A sudden deluge.

I thought of the Middle Meadow, where the absent cattle had grazed. God, that meadow was drenched in sunlight, like nothing else I’ve known. The smell of morning dew rising from freshly cut hay, soaking into my socks around my ankles. Honeysuckle wafting down from the hills no matter which way the breeze was blowing. Sweet tartness of wild black raspberries well worth the bite of multiflora rose thorns, which always seemed to guard them. Lying in the sun on a pillow of grass, like nothing could ever change but the shapes in the clouds.

I thought of the creeks, bubbling up from icy springs, where Dad taught me to hunt for fossils. Plunk-splash of a heavy boulder lugged into the swimming hole. Shocking turquoise on black of a skink’s tail, scurrying beneath a new rock for cover. Wet grit washing from my hands into clear water. Damp and earthy musk of the ancient oak that gradually decomposed, having fallen across the stream before I was born. Its rough bark under my bare feet as I ran across, sat, and stretched onto my back, limbs spread over its solid enormity, gently expanding my torso on curved surface. Lazy swaying of the younger branches above us, rustling their leaves, whistling and creaking in the gusts. Gurgling water falling in a dozen pitches, echoing in deep hollow caverns or tinkling sharp against shards of shale and limestone.

I thought of the forests, feeding fertile soil, reaching up toward the sun. High call of the redtailed hawk who’d nested in the tallest tree at the top of the tallest hill since Dad was sixteen. Tracing the lines in the scarred bark at its the base where his initials, and those of his high school crush, proclaimed their love. Spongy crack of a morel mushroom plucked from beneath its leafy mayflower umbrella. Tag with my brother, dodging and climbing, swinging from thick grape vines. Smoke in the cold evening seeping into our clothes as we traded ghost stories and laughter around a camp fire. Singing folk songs in harmony above the symphony of crickets and spring peepers. Warmth of the fire at my feet as I burrowed deeper into my sleeping bag, just my nose poking out chill in the open air. Stars twinkling through the treetops. The grownups speaking in hushed whispers, pretending not to know we only pretended to sleep. The scent of Grandpa’s pipe.

My right hand shifted, and I felt the prick of a splinter. The ground was covered in shards of wood, everywhere I looked. I imagined gathering them all up, carrying them home, and gluing them back together, one by one. Restoring the whole from every sacred piece.

I pulled the splinter from my hand, and pocketed the shard it came from. Then I stood, wiped my face on my sleeve, and walked back across the ravine for the last time.

[Mild Vorkosigan spoilers]

In the Vorkosigan saga, wealthy people can buy clones into which they transplant their brains when their original body is about to die of old age. The clone's brain, which stays with the body for the first 14 or so years, is destroyed at the time of transplant. There are no alternatives for indefinite age extension. In the novels, this is portrayed as terribly evil, and some of the plot involves saving the clones.

This business model gives me the willies, as it's meant to.

But upon reflection, I'm not sure my reaction makes much sense. Let's assume the clones spend their 14 years having a pretty good time. That assumption isn't quite in line with the book. But for the thought experiment, assume everybody's having fun.

Here are the possibilities.

1. If we don't create the clone in the first place, some old man who would otherwise have paid for the clone lives 80 years and then dies. Total of 80 life years.

2. If we do create the clone but then someone rescues them, taking them to a different planet to live their own life, then the old man that paid for the clone lives 80 years and then dies, and the clone lives 80 years and then dies. Total of 160 life years.

3. If we create the clone and everything goes as planned, an old man lives 80 years in body number 1, a clone lives 14 years in body number 2 and then dies, and the old man lives another 66 years in body number 2 and then dies. Total of 160 life years.

Preferring 1 to (2 or 3) is pretty straightforwardly silly, unless the wealthy old man uses his money to support a brand new human non-clone that would not otherwise have existed. (This looks straightforward to my reasoning parts, not my emotion parts.)

There are two obvious-to-me reasons to prefer 2 over 3.

The first is probably the one that's responsible for most of the willies: "Someone who only lived 14 years didn't live long enough, and a life cut short is worse than no life at all". I don't buy that objection. Dying after 80 years is also cutting a life short. The only reason it seems sort of ok is that as things stand, people lose quality of life just before dying because their bodies wear out. If I wouldn't prefer a lack of life to a healthy life cut short at 80, I don't think there's a principled way for me to prefer a lack of life to a life cut short at 14.

The other reason to favor 2 over 3 is "I value multiple experiences of the 80 year version of the human life process more than I value the 146 year version". And I don't buy that one either. I think people get better at using life years as they accumulate experience. In fact, I think I heard in a psychology class once that there's strong evidence that older people are happier, that people keep getting happier as they get older until they start having big problems with their aged bodies. Brief Googling supports that. So actually, I think someone who's had 80 years to figure out how to do awesome things with human experience, and who had to go through a whole 80 years of life to get things as figured out as they've got them now, is going to turn the next 66 healthy years into more awesomeness than a person starting the same 66 healthy years at age 14 could. The person starting the 66 years at age 14 begins with the same total lack of having-figured-things-out-ness we all remember from age 14, and doesn't reach the wealthy old guy's level of proficiency at life until the end of the 66 years.

I feel a little bit of pull from "but there's something valuable in the learning process of growing up from 14 to 80, and preferring 3 to 2 means that process happens once instead of twice", to which I respond "I becha there's something valuable in the learning process of growing up from 80 to 146, and preferring 2 to 3 means that process happens zero times instead of one".

The main problem with the clone business, then, is not that it exists, but that it isn't designed to maximize the children's enjoyment of life. They don't torture the children, but they do lie to them and focus mainly on keeping their bodies in spectacular health, paying fairly little attention to their minds. I think I'd fight for reform in the clone business, rather than fighting to shut it down.

Facebook discussion here.

(Epistemic status: I have zero statistics background, but damned if I won’t give this a shot anyway.)

In a recent blog post, Robin Hanson said Eva Vivalt's data indicate that the distribution of charity impacts is close to Gaussian, and is not a fat-tailed power law like Effective Altruists claim. If that's true, it pretty much undermines Effective Altruism altogether, because it means that there's not a big difference between a decent intervention and the best intervention.

Suppose the following three interventions had identical effect sizes: feeding people carrots, handing out chess strategy manuals, and deworming.

I hope you're currently wondering what the hell I just asked you to suppose, because the previous sentence was nonsense. You can only talk about the “effect size” of carrots if you’re measuring an additional thing besides carrots. The additional thing is probably not “handing out chess strategy manuals”, because then the effect size of carrots would be a measure of how good carrots are at handing out chess strategy manuals.

How about if I’m studying “feeding people carrots to make them taller”, “handing out chess strategy manuals to make them smarter”, and “deworming to eliminate intestinal parasites”?

That’s much better! Now it makes sense to talk about effect sizes for these things. There’s some amount of taller people get when you give them carrots, some amount of smarter people get when you give them chess strategy manuals, and some amount of dewormed people become when you give them wormicide.

Now what does it mean for these things to have identical effect sizes?

There are actually several reasonable answers, but here’s the one I’m seeing in Eva’s slides.

Say that the average height is 5’7”, and most people are between 5’5” and 5’9”. So the usual variation in height is “within 2 inches of average”, or a range of 4 inches. When I give somebody a bundle of carrots, they grow an inch. 5’8” plus bundle of carrots equals 5’9”. We can express the effectiveness of carrots in terms of variation in the general population: If everybody gets their Height stat by rolling a four sided die to adjust away from human average of 5’7”, eating a bundle of carrots gives you a plus one to your Height roll. It’s like a 25% bonus to randomness.

Now say that the average IQ is 100, and most people are between 95 and 105: the usual variation in IQ is “within 5 points of average”, or a range of 10 points. When I give somebody a chess book, they gain two and a half IQ points. We can express the effectiveness of the book in terms of variation in the general population: If everybody gets their Intelligence stat by rolling a ten sided die to adjust away from human average of 100, reading a chess book gives you a plus 2.5 to your Int roll. It’s a 25% bonus compared to randomness.

Then we can (sort of) compare the effect sizes of carrots and chess books: Carrots give a 25% bonus, and chess books also give a 25% bonus.

Is that useful information, though? Why does it matter if carrots give the same size of bonus to growth that chess books give to IQ?

Now if carrots happened to also make people smarter, then comparing effect sizes would be useful. We’d be talking about two different interventions aimed at the same outcome. Furthermore, we could dispense with the standardized statistical effect size stuff, and look directly at the absolute number of IQ points gained from a dollar’s worth of chess books, and the number of IQ points gained from a dollar’s worth of carrots.

If it turned out that all intelligence interventions gave the same Int bonus per dollar, then we might as well flip a coin to decide between carrots and chess books. Same thing if it turned out that we weren’t good enough at measuring things to tell the difference between the effects of carrots and chess books on intelligence. Any time spent “picking the best one” would be wasted.

But what if you don't know how much chess books and carrots cost? And what if you don't know how many carrots are in a bundle? Maybe you know that a "bundle of carrots" - whatever number of carrots the charity is distributing per person - has the same effect as a chess book, but you don't know that the chess book costs four times as much as the bundle of carrots. It would be premature to say that time spent choosing between carrots and chess books is wasted, because if you learned the cost, you'd fund the carrots.

It might even be that the effect of carrots only seems to match the effect of chess books because the carrot people kept putting more carrots into the bundles until a bundle was as good as a chess book, and then they stopped. (Because that's where they reach some socially agreed-upon level of 'statistical significance', perhaps?) Maybe if you put twelve carrots into the bundle instead of six, you get twice as many IQ points as a chess book causes, and for half the price! But you don't know; you just know that as things are now, the carrot charity is making people about as much smarter as the chess charity.

And that, it seems to me, is what Eva's data actually say. When I emailed her for clarification, she said that, "Most of the interventions can't be statistically distinguished from each other for a given outcome." She also said cost wasn't factored in yet (though she suspected it wouldn't change much). So if she's right, then as far as we can tell, all the deworming interventions are currently equally good at killing worms, all the microfinance interventions are equally good at alleviating poverty, and so on for the top 20 international development programs.

If it’s true that the top 20 international development programs are just as good at whatever they do as all the other programs they’re directly competing with, even when you factor in cost, this has significant implications for Effective Altruism. It means we can stop evaluating individual charities once we've identified the "pretty good" ones.

But there’s a stronger claim it’s easy to confuse this with. (Eva’s presentation was called “Everything You Know Is Wrong”, and a couple of her slides said, “Anyone who claims they know what works is lying”. I tend to expect confusion when such strong System 1 language accompanies abstract statistical analysis.) The stronger claim is “the top 20 interventions are equally good at saving lives, regardless of how they go about it”. If that were true, it would chuck the premises of Effective Altruism right out the window.

If you want to compare two interventions with different outcomes - medicated mosquito nets vs. microfinance - you’re going to need some way of converting between malaria and poverty. When we’re talking about altruism, the common factor is Quality Adjusted Life Years.

There’s some amount of better a person’s life is when they don’t have malaria, and some amount of time they remain malaria-free after you give them mosquito nets. There’s also some amount of better a person’s life gets when they’re fifty bucks less poor, and some amount of time they stay fifty bucks less poor after you give them fifty bucks. So you can compare bug nets to microfinance through QUALYs once you've got data on 1) effect sizes, 2) how nice it is to be healthy or less poor, 3) how long people stay healthy or less poor once they get that way via bug nets or microfinance.

You need all three of those things. The fact that the effect sizes are identical doesn't matter if a medicated mosquito net is worth orders of magnitude more QUALYs than fifty bucks. Eva's data only include effect sizes.

It doesn't make sense to compare "how many worms a deworming intervention kills" with "how much AIDS a box of condoms prevents" until you know how much those problems affect quality of life, and for how long. So even if all deworming interventions are equally effective, the choice between “deworming” and “condoms” could still be massively important.

And that’s the central claim I take EA to be making.

Eva's analysis says nothing about distribution of QUALYs over all EA interventions under consideration. Maybe it’s Gaussian after all, but this isn’t new evidence either way.

Helpful context: Tortoise Skills page, Effective Rest Days, Inhibition: Game Plan, Tortoise Report 3: Empathy

I was thinking about ways to trick my brain into being more like it is on a rest day, even though there’s specific work I plan to do today, when I noticed a feeling of "not being allowed to do that". I inferred that I must have just wanted something and shut down the wanting without even being aware of it. So I examined my recent memory, and found a desire to get a pedicure. (That counts as “noticing an impulse”, at this stage, so I tapped my fingers together.)

My natural reaction was to wonder whether it makes sense for me to indulge the impulse, and why I shut it down to begin with. Why am I "not allowed" to get a pedicure? This isn't a new thing; I really like getting pedicures, but I hardly ever do it.

Money is one reason, but it's not sufficient to stop me getting the occasional pedicure just because. Doing things that make me happy is what having money is for. Even System 1 believes that at this point, so it's not where most of the "not allowed" is coming from.

Actually, I'm embarrassed about how beaten up my feet are from running. Although I’m not missing any toenails, the bottoms of my feet are covered in calluses and blisters. I’m averse to making the manicurist deal with them. (I note that this inhibition falls under “taking care of other people”, which I've hypothesized is the main kind of inhibition that wears me out.)

What does a manicurist experience when a runner comes in? If I imagine the situation from my own perspective, looking down from my chair, I simulate her with a disgusted look on her face, as though I've been terribly inconsiderate, coming to a nail salon with feet like that. She does her work as quickly as possible, with reluctance and resentment.

Empathy time (gosh, that one's turning out to be so useful!): If I imagine the situation from her perspective, looking at me and my feet, she thinks, "another runner," and goes about her business, doing as much as she can and not worrying about the rest, just like she does every time a runner comes in. Or anytime anyone comes in, really. It changes literally nothing in her routine.

If I try to color in the simulation with a specific emotion, it’s the one I'd feel in her position; something like "Her poor feet! I'm glad she came to me to have them cared for properly." When I offer that feeling to my brain with an interrogative tag, beside the “disgust/resentment” hypothesis, it clicks as a correctness feeling, while the other is rejected with a “that’s not the real world” feeling.

But back to inhibition: Even if she is disgusted and inconvenienced, I'm paying her to care for my feet. I never signed a contract saying I'd only bring in feet that are already in perfect condition.

This is not an inhibition I endorse. Getting a pedicure is a perfectly good way to help me into a more rest-day-like frame of mind. Decision:

Observations:

• I benefit a lot from “rest days” that are more about acting on my immediate impulses than about resting physically or cognitively.
• Sometimes a rest day is an emergency, because I’ve completely exhausted myself in a particular way that makes the prospect of serving others feel threatening.
• On rest days, I often find that I’ve suppressed an impulse that I should obviously have acted on, or that I’m in the process of suppressing such an impulse. (Example: I realize that I’ve been thirsty for the last half hour and have repeatedly denied the urge to get a glass of water because I wasn’t done reading an article I set out to read.)
• I find social interaction exhausting, especially social interaction with large groups of strangers, even when I’m enjoying myself.
• I find social interaction much less exhausting when I drink alcohol.
• I am happier when I drink alcohol in a way that feels more like a barrier to emotion being removed than like any particular extra sensation being pleasant. (I sometimes end up sadder if I start out sad.)
• I am smarter, in a certain sense, when I drink alcohol. Ideas come more easily, combine with other ideas more easily, and inspire actions (like expressing ideas) that I immediately execute.
• A successful rest day feels a lot like being slightly tipsy.
• Both rest days and the effects of alcohol feel like they have something in common with the creative state of mind I enter when thinking of a mnemonic image.

Inferences and Speculation:

• I ordinarily waste a lot of cognitive resources inhibiting impulses unnecessarily.
• Social exhaustion is caused, at least in part, by the same inhibitory patterns that can cause rest days to be emergencies.
• I have gained a little control over inhibition under some circumstances (rest days and mnemonics).

Hypotheses:

• I will be substantially happier, smarter, and more socially resilient if I learn to be less inhibited.
• I can learn to be less inhibited.

Planning

What does a failure to apply the skill look like? It looks like subconsciously exerting control to prevent an action whose outcome would be neutral or beneficial. Concretely: I’m riding my bike when I see a certain plant, and want to know what it looks like up close. I don’t slow down to find out, even though I don’t have any time constraints or other reasons not to slow down besides “I am biking”.

(Hm, this suggests I’m attached to my current activity, whatever that might be, by default. And looking at that thought is slightly painful. I’m afraid that if I believe my problem comes from being attached to my current activity, I’ll start to frequently tear myself away from my current activity, which will hurt. Message received: If this comes down to needing to frequently pull myself away from my current activity, I’ll be sure to find a pleasant, non-damaging way to do so. And I don't actually expect this to be a big problem. Remember what rest days are like? They're happy, not painful. Am I still clinging to being attached to my current activity even given that? No, I think I trust myself with this.)

Success will probably come in two stages. In the first stage, I’ll bring my impulses into direct conscious examination, choosing deliberately whether or not to act on them. That would be like noticing I want to know what the plant looks like up close, asking myself whether I should stop to look at it, and then stopping to look at it if I get a “yes”. In the second stage, I’ll have eliminated the bias toward inhibiting impulses, and I’ll act on impulses that seem beneficial or neutral without need for conscious effort. That would look like a smooth motion from wondering what the plant looks like to stopping to look at it.

My first hypothesis for a trigger is “wanting something”. I’ll tap my fingers together every time I notice myself wanting something (even when I’m not taking the day off). I expect this to be sufficient for the first stage of success; once I’m aware of wanting something, I expect deliberately choosing whether to have it will be easier than not deliberately choosing.

I'll also try exploratory study pf the phenomenology of wanting and inhibition under the influence of alcohol, and during a mnemonics exercise.

I won’t be surprised if the second stage of success just comes with practice, but training may turn out to suggest faster or more reliable ways of internalizing the habit.

Do I risk losing important abilities I won't be able to get back if I succeed at this? Yes. I risk automatically acting on impulses it would have been better to inhibit. But this only seems like a risk with the second stage of success, and not with the first. With the first stage I'll be deliberately choosing. To mitigate this, I'll look for sensations that can distinguish helpful inhibition from harmful inhibition that happen before I have an opportunity to notice actual wanting. My goal will eventually be to be able to predict when an impulse I should deny is about to occur, and when an impulse I should indulge is about to occur. The risk isn't obviously worse than the current state of affairs. I'm happy to cross that bridge when I come to it, so I'll go ahead and begin to train "noticing wanting".

Results will be in the next Tortoise Report.

What's a "Tortoise Report"? See the Tortoise Skills page.

Habit: Staying Sane While Defensive

Duration: 2 Months (This one took some time to get a handle on.)

Success: 7/10

Trigger: A feeling of being drawn into my solar plexus and closing a shield around myself for protection from attacks during interactions with other people

Action: Empathy

Result: I’m not sure I’ve reduced the frequency with which I get defensive very much, which is my long-term goal with this. But the feeling doesn’t get the chance to do nearly as much damage.

If I’m defensive and Eliezer says “that sounds like a bad idea,” I hear, “your idea is bad and you are bad and you should feel bad”. So I fear that he’s updated toward “I am bad”, and want to persuade him that he’s made an error, and in fact I am good. (My attempt is extremely clumsily given my state of unreflection and confusion, of course, and I end up completely undermining it right from the start). I fear he’ll enforce “you should feel bad” with further statements that will make me feel worse, so I feel I need to convince him that it’s false that I should feel bad. All of that defending, of course, gets tied up with a defense of the idea itself.

It’s a giant mess.

He never actually means anything like “your idea is bad and you are bad and you should feel bad”. When he says “that sounds like a bad idea”, he means something like “I predict that acting on the expressed beliefs and inferences will result in outcomes neither of us wants”. Which is blatantly obvious to me the moment I bother to simulate his mental state at all.

Empathy works surprisingly well against defensiveness for me. When I’m defensive, I tend to interpret everything that’s said to me as indicating a value judgement, which seems to be where most of the insanity comes from. Now, when I realize I’m defensive, I imagine what it might be like to be the other person, and what states of mind are most likely to be motivating their behaviors. I usually find my defensiveness-motivated interpretation was completely ridiculous, and I have the opportunity to check when it’s not so clear. I also have the opportunity to say, “I’m feeling defensive,” which can lead to having the rest of the discussion when I’m feeling more secure, or when I’ve eaten or exercised. But even when, upon reflection, I simulate the other person as actually wanting to hurt me, I end up feeling more compassion for them than any need to protect myself.

I don’t yet have an action that reliably leads to me leaving the defensive state of mind, nor a trigger that might allow me to prevent defensiveness in the first place. But being able to not suddenly go completely bonkers when I feel defensive is a pretty big deal.

Side note, one of my main methods when it comes to cognitive habit training is “seek opportunities to practice”. That does not seem to work for me with defensiveness. I had a Facebook thread where I asked people to post about a few topics I consider more or less “emotionally triggering” for me, or to post about things they expected would make me defensive, and it totally failed. Lots of great posts, no defensiveness. There was exactly one minor success, which caused something more like “competitiveness” than the thing that makes me crazy. (I felt compelled to spend many hours defending a certain interpretation of Indian Buddhist doctrine and my inferences from it, and to intellectually dominate the people who were wrong.) But for the most part, I felt a lot of closeness and trust with everyone in that thread, especially the people who expressed negative emotions about me specifically. I felt like, “This is beautiful, I wish I’d done this a long time ago!”

Then I tried reading internet criticisms of Eliezer through Tumblr and Rationalwiki. It all felt silly and actually made me kind of happy, I’m not totally sure why but maybe because I’m proud to be serving someone who gets such strange and outrageous criticisms. “I don’t get the impression that he’s really an earth-shatteringly good mathematician.” Also, did you know? Less Wrong “hopes to make humanity more rational, protect the universe from the development of evil(or "unfriendly") AI and usher in a golden era where we will all be immortal deathless cyborgs having hot sex with sexbots on a terraformed Mars.” There’s some great stuff out there.

I think defensiveness is one of the things that mostly dissolves under scrutiny. I noticed big improvements in my reactions long before I felt like I had any idea what to do with the things I was feeling. There must be some kind of feedback loop in defensiveness that relies on my attention being elsewhere. And if I’m actively expecting to become defensive, the cycle can’t even complete its first loop.

Edit: This report should really contain detailed descriptions of my usual experience of defensiveness before training, and my usual experience of defensiveness now.

Unfortunately, my memories of defensiveness before two months ago are far less detailed, since I'd never explicitly paid attention to those experiences. But I do have some vague memories of, for instance, reading one of Person's blog posts criticizing the LW community about a year ago, and I recall stuff like this: Reading the title, I feel a flash of fear/foreboding, plus a strong attraction. While reading the article, I feel compelled to continue reading, the way I'm compelled to keep looking at a car accident for as long as possible while I drive by it. I feel sort of poised to pounce, on high alert for phrases and claims I might be able to use as ammunition. I also feel almost overwhelming "wanting to move away from the possibility of harsh criticisms that might be true". Afterward, it's like there's a movie playing on repeat in my head, containing bits and pieces of the article, anger directed at Person, counterarguments, and fantasies of publicly stomping on them intellectually while everyone else cheers. I probably don't actually write anything (or at least I don't recall ever having done so), but the thoughts themselves feel totally out of my control. There's definitely an absence of awareness of that fact as well, but that's just a retrospective observation about the memories, of course, not a particular thing I felt at the time.

And here's an experience of defensiveness from last night: Late at night I started talking about a thing with Eliezer. He told me that there's a pattern he'd like to break, where I keep waiting until he's much too sleepy to think clearly before I try to talk to him about anything interesting. I started trying to explain why I think it sort of makes sense for that to happen, emphasizing things more under his control than mine, like "whenever you're not tired, you're usually either working or reading, and I don't want to interrupt you at those times". As I was talking, I noticed that I'd been feeling the following sensations: "wanting to hide inside myself for safety", "holding onto something", "fear of losing something", "needing to protect something", "not having a very clear view of what was happening in my mind". I stopped explaining why it made sense for me to end up talking to him late at night, and became curious about what I was afraid of, what I was holding onto, and reasoned that there's probably something I cherish that part of me believes I can only get by talking to Eliezer late at night. The thing I wanted to protect was probably the cherished thing, and being slightly aggressive - convincing him that the things he wants lead to me talking to him late at night, suggesting that he'd have to give up things he wants if he forced me to stop talking to him late at night - served to reduce the risk that I'd lose my grasp on the cherished thing. I offered this hypothesis to my brain with an interrogative tag, and it responded with emotional sensations of "correctness" and "mild relief/security at having been understood". I mostly paused the conversation since he didn't want to talk late at night, but a fantasy version of the conversation continued in my head, and the topic changed to "what exactly do I think I can get only from talking to him late at night, and are there actually ways to get that elsewhere?" This was accompanied by a mild feeling of frustration and maybe indignation that I couldn't have the fantasy conversation out loud at that moment. The fantasy conversation felt deliberate, not obsessive, and it was easy to let go of when I decided to do that.

What's a "Tortoise Report"? See the Tortoise Skills page.

Habit: Verbal Processing

Duration: 1 Week

Success: 2/10

Trigger: Distress or loss of concentration when hearing more than one verbal stream at once, or when reading while people are talking nearby or music with lyrics is playing

Action: Reflective attention (didn't get any farther than that)

Result: I’m much more likely to invite conversation partners away from larger groups, and to immediately put in earbuds playing rain when trying to read or write while hearing music with lyrics. (Previously I’d waste time and attention attempting to focus despite distraction.)

This continues to not look like low-hanging fruit. It’s important and I hope to make progress on it eventually, but there are more important things right now.

There is a road stretching from here to a future I imagine.

In that future, there are experts of domain-general reasoning, of prediction, and of cognitive boot-strapping toward accuracy and effectiveness. Many of them have explicit knowledge of how to masterfully wield human intelligence, in the way a present-day fencing instructor knows how to wield a foil. The children there can become such masters in a single lifetime (though to be fair, a single lifetime is probably a lot more than 80 years).

What do you think the bricks on that road are made of?

These bubbles represent possible bricks you yourself could lay on the road to the future I imagine - things that might carry you toward it. What happens when you arrange them in order from the smallest, least important brick to the largest, most important brick?

What are the implications of the fact that you have an answer to that question, even if you're not very confident in your answer?

What is the largest brick you could lay right now?

Today is my day off.

I’ve been really good at days off recently. I used to be terrible at them. I used to not have much of a strategy, and I'd basically end up forcing myself to stay put and not do anything strenuous or work-like. I often ended up feeling sort of depressed, and the next day I wasn't at all ready to work.

On my most recent day off, I climbed a mountain, ran several miles, and got some chores done. I felt excellent and ready to work hard the next day.

Here's how my new strategy has played out so far today.

When I woke up this morning, I thought I should have breakfast, and that I should treat myself to something extra tasty and extravagant, like bacon and a fancy omelet, or perhaps a souffle.

I snapped my fingers. That, I realized, had been one of my flags: an image of how my day off should be, according some stereotype of a “day off”. I asked myself, “What do I actually want, right now?” posing the question as an invitation, a desire-shaped door held open for any nearby desires that might like to wader in. Does “bacon and souffle” fit through that door? No, actually. That’s not a desire-shaped thought. It's a day-off-shaped thought.

On days off, [if I feel like I'm playing out the role of a character taking a day off] --> [then I ask myself what I actually want right now.]

My gaze happened across a box of cookies-and-cream protein bars, and a new image sprang to consciousness: a heated protein bar sitting on a plate beside a glass of milk and some Soylent. I felt warm and happy thinking about it, and it went right through the desire-shaped door I’d created. I snapped my fingers, recognizing another flag - a sensation of desire - and then hesitated, mildly confused.

2: “Really? A protein bar and Soylent?”

1: “Yes. And milk.”

2: “That sounds like the kind of breakfast we’d have if we were clumsily motivated by body image. Are we sure we wouldn’t rather have bacon? Even if we could push a button to summon it instead of having to cook? Even if it had no effect at all on our body, besides giving us energy and satiating hunger?”

1: “summons an image of biting into a warm, gooey cookies-and-cream protein bar Yes, definitely.

2: “Well, ok then. We genuinely want this right now, and it doesn't cost anything. We’ll have that.”

On days off, [if I feel a sensation of desire] --> [then I check whether I genuinely want it right now, and if so I give it to myself, provided it costs less than ten bucks].

Later, I was walking down the street toward a coffee shop I like, when I felt another flagged sensation: the cognitive aftertaste of a recently suppressed desire. I stopped, snapped my fingers, and invited desires from recent memory to present themselves. Nothing was forthcoming. I looked around, hoping to jog my memory, and quickly locked onto a men’s clothing store on the corner.

2: “What? Why would we want to go in there?”

1: “We're curious.”

2: “Oh right, we’ve been curious every time we’ve passed here for like a year and a half, haven’t we.”

1: “Yep. Let’s go.”

2: “But we can tell from here that it won’t have anything we want to buy. It’s mostly blue jeans and flannel button-downs.”

1: “You say that every time, but we’re still curious.”

2: “Hm, yeah, that's strange. What are we curious about?”

1: “We want to see what it looks like, know how big the inside is, touch all the furry coats on that rack outside.”

2: “Oh. I guess whether we’ll buy anything is completely irrelevant then. That was a silly reason to suppress a desire.”

1: “Yep. Let’s go.”

2: “Ok.”

On days off, [if I notice I've suppressed a desire] --> [then I excavate that desire for further examination].

My plan when I got to the coffee shop was to read fiction. The thought of reading fiction at the coffee shop was what caused me to leave the house in the first place, and I looked forward to it the whole way here. Reading more fiction is something I’d like to do, and rest days are good times for that. But as soon as I sat down in this chair and started reading, I felt a desire to write. Specifically, I desired to write about this recent change in my approach to rest days that has so greatly increased their value.

2: “But we told all those past time-slices we’d get to read fiction when we got to the coffee shop.”

1: “But we are here now, and we want to write, not read.”

2: “Yeah but, what about reflective cooperation across the intertemporal coalition? Our past selves had our future wellbeing in mind when they desired that we read. They thought we needed to spend more time reading fiction, and we agree with them. They’d be disappointed to hear their decision was overpowered by an unreflective impulse,

(translation: summons image of trying to stick to a diet, yet succumbing to the immediate temptation to have a cookie every time a cookie desire happens)

which would damage the power of our future selves’ intentions to motivate our actions

(translation: summons image of a future self deciding to try a new diet, while the memory of all the past times with the cookies plays through their head and reduces their confidence in the intertemporal coalition’s ability to stick to diets).

That’s most of what ‘being responsible’ means to us.”

1: “Oh, I see. But you’ve forgotten something: The intertemporal coalition, including the recent past time-slices of which you speak, has consented to privilege my needs. Remember why?"

2: “Yes. We have a bias toward privileging the desires of certain other people and our future selves. It leads to fatigue when not occasionally counter-balanced. Privileging our own current selves is a necessary condition for successfully recharging on a rest day. That’s what ‘taking a day off’ means to us. All of our time-slices since February have been clear on that. Sorry, my mistake.”

1: “It’s ok. We also forgot to snap our fingers when we felt the sensation of ‘feeling like the responsible thing is to override an impulse’.”

2: “Indeed. snaps fingers Ok, let’s write.”

On days off, [if I feel like the responsible thing is to override an impulse] --> [then I'll remember why I've chosen to privilege the desires of my present self today.]

It's not the case that I recharge best by "not doing work" and "physically resting". The part of me that needs rest is neither my body nor my concentration. The part that needs rest is the part of me that manages my impulses to makes sure the people around me and my future selves get what they need.

This is not surprising in retrospect, given I spend all the rest of my time in a service role.

So my new strategy for effective rest days is all about attention to a few key sensations that indicate it might be time to put my own present needs first, despite my instincts:

• desire
• noticing I've suppressed a desire
• playing the role of a character taking a day off
• being responsible by overriding an impulse

If you're not getting much out of your days off and also happen to be in a service role (like nursing, teaching, or leading an organization), maybe this approach could help you, too.

Kevin helps us train an epistemic CTAP for responding to fearful doubt.

My imaginary friend Kevin helps us learn attention techniques that improve our ability to notice things.

I've so far talked a lot about the "trigger" part of trigger-action planning (which I've often called "noticing"). Here's a tip that can help identify not just the correct trigger, but also the correct action.

“Tomorrow, you wake up to find that the thought pattern you want has miraculously established itself. What’s the very first thing you notice that’s different?”

This is called “The Miracle Question”.

The habit of thought I’m currently working on is defensiveness. At this point, all I’ve got is a trigger I’m part way through refining. I’ve studied my default pattern of thought and feeling, the one that’s causing me problems. But I don’t have any idea what to do about it yet, so this is a great time to ask The Miracle Question.

I ask myself this question via simulation, not conceptualization. I don’t just think the words or activate the abstract concepts in my mind. Rather, I pose the question by vividly imagining the experiences of a version of myself who miraculously wakes up possessing the skill I want (even if I'm not quite sure what the skill is yet).

Playing through that movie in my mind, what is the first thing to tip me off that I must be imagining her instead of me?

Ok, so I wake up. Then what? I roll over, open my eyes. I grab my phone, push the on button, and see some Facebook updates. I click through and start to read a comment where someone has criticized my idea - and this is where I feel surprise. Reading the comment, I’m still feeling just about as pleasantly languid as I was before, modulo the added focus needed to understand the comment. I feel the difference while imagining this, because ordinarily I'd respond to this situation with some sort of stress.

So what have I gained from this exercise?

I now have a concrete image of the world I hope to steer myself toward, on the scale of moment-to-moment experiences. Before, I just had a thought like "I want to spend less time being defensive." That's different from knowing in precise, concrete detail what it would look like to spend less time being defensive. I don’t know how to get to that other world yet, but I know precisely what gap I'll need to bridge: The specific change I’m after is one that will allow me to read a Facebook criticism when I’ve just woken up while feeling calm engagement.

My search for correct actions is now constrained to things that would plausibly cause that outcome - that would transport me into The Miracle World. Any potential action that would fail to bridge at least part of the gap between here and there is a step in the wrong direction.

[Epistemic status: This is my working model. I think something like this is probably happening irl. Some of my details of neurology, anatomy, and evolutionary biology are probably wrong. I'd be only slightly surprised if I converted from HOPs theory to some sort of HOTs theory in the next year, but I don't think that would have strong practical implications.]

1

Trigger-action plans exist on a spectrum. Over on the left, you have TAPs like "If I enter my house through my front door, I'll put my keys in the box on the side table." On the right you have TAPs like "If I'm confused, I'll stop and compare what I expected to happen to what happened instead."

keys <-----------------> confusion

Roughly speaking, the stuff on the left is physical, and the stuff on the right is cognitive.

The stuff on the right seems to be harder. Why is that? This post is about my attempt to answer that question.

How do you know when you've just opened your front door? You saw the door in front of you, felt the knob turn in your hand, heard a creaking sound as it opened, and now you see a hole where the door used to be.

How do you know when you've just felt confusion? In my case, I'd know because I'd have noticed feeling a sudden burst of surprise followed by a lack of resolution that's now developed into a hanging that's-not-rightness.

But I know that because I spent a long time studying my own reactions to confusing situations. I attended strategically to confusion. If you asked me five years ago how I know when I'm confused, I might have said, "Well, I just... know, you know?"

And if you'd asked me five years ago, I'd have been wrong. The truth would have been, "I usually don't know when I'm confused."

2

I think of human introspection as analogous to the parietal eyes of lizards. Lizards (and some other animals) have a light sensor atop their heads that can't detect anything more specific than the presence or absence of light.

If you took away a lizard's true eyes and left it with just the primitive third eye, it would have something almost but not quite entirely unlike vision. It could distinguish night from day, but certainly not knights from daisies. In other words, it would be about as blind as its distant ancestors who had just begun to develop sight. Lizard-relevant parts of the world would be way more complicated than its vision could handle.

My best guess about why introspection is harder than outrospection is this: We're in an awkward evolutionary stage where the human-relevant goings-on inside our brains are way more complicated than our shiny new prefrontal cortices can handle.

We have an organ that lets us perceive high-order cognitive algorithms like "my inferences from what my model of Karen's brain predicts I will say", or "the thing happening in my auditory cortex when I hear E above middle C".* But we still have the primitive version of the organ. We've not yet evolved true introspection. So we can perceive our thoughts and feelings, maybe for the first time in evolutionary history, but our perception tends to be vague, fuzzy, and weak. Night and day, not knights and daisies.

3

But there's a funny thing about perception of cognitive algorithms.

Imagine you're playing Where's Waldo...

...but instead of carefully scanning through the chaos, you can turn everything without red stripes into a perfectly blank white background. Suddenly, the game wouldn't push your visual processing to its limits. Finding Waldo would be easy.

You can't change a physical image just by thinking about it - but you can change your cognitive algorithms by thinking. That's what thinking is.

So introspection is hard because our PFC is primitive, but there are still things we can do to make it easier. If I want to train a thoroughly cognitive trigger-action plan, my strategy should make it as easy as possible on my primitive PFC.

The art of streamlining thought for successful perception seems to consist of strategic use of attention, as far as I can tell. Attending in ways that make the most of a human PFC will be the subject of an upcoming post.

---

*Considering introspection to be a "sense" is a minority position among philosophers of mind (I think?). I recommend the SEP article on higher-order consciousness theories if you're curious about other perspectives.

I suspect that the overwhelming majority of good epistemic practice is best thought of as cognitive trigger-action plans to customize and internalize.

[If I'm afraid of a proposition] → [then I'll visualize how the world would be and what I would actually do if the proposition were true.]

[If everything seems to hang on a particular word] → [then I'll taboo that word and its synonyms.]

[If I flinch away from a thought at the edge of peripheral awareness] → [then I'll focus my attention directly on that thought.]

Before looking back through some of the Lesswrong Sequences, I installed the trigger-action plan "[If I notice that something I read feels important] --> [then I'll ask myself, "In what real-life situations is it important?" and design a trigger-action plan to impliment the insight.]" Sometimes I fail to identify a correct action, but I at least come up with some hypothesis for what the right trigger would be, so I can study my own experience of relevant situations.

(When I train a trigger well, I often find I'm done, anyway.)

You can gain a lot of abstract insights by reading, which can re-orient your mind and shift your whole approach to the world. You can learn some great hacks for problem solving by taking the right classes and workshops. But when it comes to advancing your own art in the ongoing context of daily life, CTAPs is the name of the game. It is the way to change your default responses to sensations of thought and emotion.

[If something feels key to advancing your art as a rationalist] → [stop, drop, and trigger-action plan.]

I was at first astonished by how often my pesky cognitive mistakes were solved by nothing but skillful use of attention. Now I sort of see what's going on, and it feels less odd.

What happens to your bad habit of motivated stopping when you train consistent reflective attention to "motivated stopping"? The motivation dissolves under scrutiny.

What happens to your disputes over definitions when you train consistent attention to having lost sight of what you really disagree about? You gain sight of what you really disagree about.

What happens to your neglect of base rates when you train consistent reflective attention to the sensations of base rate neglect? You start thinking about base rates at the times when you need to most.

If you recognize something as a mistake, part of you probably has at least some idea of what to do instead. Indeed, anything besides ignoring the mistake is often a good thing to do instead. So merely noticing when you're going wrong can be over half the battle.

There's a super short distilled version of my method for training cognitive habits, and I call it "The Art Of Noticing".

Skills I have so far trained using Noticing, with very little reliance on any other technique, include empathy, not trudging uselessly ahead when I'm trying to learn something but have gotten lost, and anti-"guessing the teacher's password".

The Art Of Noticing goes like this:

1. Answer the question, "What's my first possible clue that I'm about to encounter the problem?" If your problem is "I don't respond productively to being confused," then the first sign a crucial moment is coming might be "a fleeting twinge of surprise". Whatever that feels like in real time from the inside of your mind, that's your trigger.

2. Whenever you notice your trigger, make a precise physical gesture. Snap your fingers, tap your foot, touch your pinky finger with your thumb - whatever feels comfortable. Do it every time you notice that fleeting twinge of surprise.

Noticing is not the end of the story. But I am astonished by how much of the story it appears to be. In many situations, merely Noticing is well over half the battle, and what's left automatically works itself out on the fly.

Ever since I posted about Tell Culture a year ago, people have been debating whether direct or indirect communication is better.

(One day I will learn to frame my important points in a way that is controversial enough to popularize them.)

I find this frustrating.

The concept of "communication cultures" is a kind of cognitive first aid. It's better to have tourniquettes than to not have tourniquettes, because otherwise people bleed to death. But there's a lot more to medicine than first aid, and a tourniquette will never reattach a severed arm.

What kind of cognitive first aid is "communication cultures"? What does it prevent people from dying of before they make it to the hospital?

Harmful misunderstandings can happen when people from one communication culture interact with people from another communication culture without recognizing that the other group employs different assumptions, and relies on a different skillset. That's the thing knowing about "communication cultures" saves you from.

But that's first aid, no more or less. If "Tell Culture vs. Guess Culture" is all you know about communication and you want to communicate effectively, you're alive, but you're a long damn way from "healthy".

There are skills, techniques, and insights you have to gain before you can communicate well, in a way that satisfies the values of everyone involved.

To master communication, you can't just be like, "I prefer Tell Culture, which is better than Guess Culture, so my disabilities in Guess Culture are therefore justified." Justified shmustified, you're still missing an arm.

To reattach a limb, you need lots of medical knowledge and advanced surgical skills. To master communication, you have to actually learn things that empower you to communicate.

My advice to you - my request of you, even - if you find yourself fueling these debates, is to (for the love of god) move on. If you've already applied cognitive first aid, you've created an affordance for further advancement. Using even more tourniquettes doesn't help.

A better use of your resources would be identifying what you most want to do with communication, and what factors are most important for accomplishing that. What is the next thing you need to learn in order to get what you want out of communication? What is the most important problem in the art of communication, and what can you do to solve it?

If you're comfortable with direct communication, it may be that what you need most right now is one of the central Guess Techniques. Basic empathy, maybe. Go talk to someone who thrives in Guess Culture, and instead of picking a fight, try to learn something.

What's a "Tortoise Report"? See the Tortoise Skills page.

Habit: Empathy

Duration: 2 Months

Success: 9/10

Trigger: Curiosity directed at another person

Action: Pushing the curiosity through their external presentation to penetrate their internal experience

Result: I enjoy socializing with people I like. (!!!) I'm giving this 9/10 because of how surprising and useful the success is, not because I feel like I've almost mastered the skill.

ETA 6/30/15: I went to a party last night where I saw someone who hadn't interacted with me in person for a year. He said I seemed a lot different socially, and in particular he described me as "warm". That's definitely a first.

ETA 2/18/2016: I retained the ability to empathize deliberately, but as my motivation to practice a new skill simply because it was new skill faded, I exercised that ability less and less frequently. By November I was back to avoiding socialization completely. In the past month, I've gained a supporting skill (or property or something) that makes me feel motivated to empathize pretty much all the time: I've gained human connection as a terminal value. I feel motivated to understand people merely because I want to understand them. It feels like a direct urge, not a deliberately calculated tactic. As a result, it's pretty easy to initiate and maintain empathy. I'll write more about this later, but it seemed important to note that a second piece was needed.

A dialogue, in which I teach this skill to myself from a year ago.

In addition to being a Tortoise Report, this is an experiment in gaining pedagogical content knowledge by imagining the most efficient way to bestow a skill I now possess on my pre-skilled self.

Potentially Interesting Person: No, I'm in the Bay Area now. I'm working through Code Academy. Been volunteering for CFAR and sleeping on Tilia's couch.

Me: thinks: Ugh, why am I at this party. I hate this hate this hate this. How do other people enjoy socializing???

Me: So you're planning to Earn To Give?

PIP: Yeah, that's the plan.

Me: Cool.

PIP: What about you? I follow you on Facebook but like I don't know what you actually do with most of your time.

Me: Suppresses a sigh. Oh, this and that. I do some stuff for CFAR myself, and I just got back from giving a series of mnemonics workshops in the Midwest.

PIP: Right, I remember you posting about that! How'd those go?

PIP freezes in the middle of a hand gesture. The party around us goes quiet. Standing beside PIP is another version of me, slightly plumper and with longer hair.

Future Me: Hi! I'm you from a year in the future, and I'm going to teach you about empathy.

Me: "Empathy?" That sounds boring.

Future Me: It isn't.

Everything plays backward briefly.

PIP: Right, I remember you posting about that! How'd those go?

Me: The first one went exceedingly well. I was shocked, actually. The second one was so-so, though people seemed pretty happy with it.

PIP: Cool! What did you teach?

pause

Future Me: How are you feeling right now?

Me: Trapped, bored, tired, like I'm wasting my time. I'd rather be at home reading. Why do I even go to these parties?

Future Me: If I recall correctly, you think that since you no longer have social anxiety, you should be participating in socialization like ordinary humans.

Me: That does sound sort of silly doesn't it. Just because I'm not terrified doesn't mean I'm actually benefiting from this. Maybe I should just stop going to parties.

Future Me: That might be wise. But what do you think would happen if you declined literally every invitation to any kind of socialization, even coffee, that you expected would make you feel bored and tired?

Me: ...Well then I guess I just wouldn't interact in person with anybody but Eliezer.

Future Me: Indeed. Why do you think you feel this way in social interactions so frequently?

Me: looking a bit sad and helpless I guess I probably just... don't like people. I mean, I know I like People, as an abstract category, at least sometimes. My whole life is about making sure People continue to exist for a very long time. But whatever it is that makes other people enjoy in-person socialization, I just don't have it.

Future Me: You think that you never care about individual people in physical proximity, that you're not a compassionate person, right? Like you have some long-range compassion, or at least long-range aesthetic appreciation for humanity, but no short-range compassion, no empathy.

Me: That sounds about right, yeah.

Future Me: So first of all, I want to point out a problem with your conception of self.

Me: I don't really have much of one of those anymore. I mean I know I used to, I used to have a solid story about who I was and I didn't think the central features of it could change much. Now I think my properties are fluid and dynamic.

Future Me: Yes, that's much better than before. But you say that your properties are "fluid and dynamic". I know you think you're bad at visualization, but you don't realize yet how much skill you've gained in that area recently. Use the same mental motion you'd use to solidify an association, and tell me how you visualize your properties being fluid and dynamic.

Me: Hm. I'm seeing this picture of the inside of my head, and it's full of cloud puddles of different colors all swirling around making whooshing sounds When I learn something, a new one flows in through my skull, and sometimes one of them leaves.

Future Me: So when mnemonics gave you the ability to visualize like that, a new skill flowed into your head and you became "someone who can visualize things".

Me: Sure.

Future Me: Doesn't that sound awfully essentialist to you?

Me: ...No?

Future Me: No?

Me: Well I'm just a collection of abilities and aversions and goals and a bunch of other things, and things in that mix can change at any time. If I were essentialist, I'd think I had a single solid soul-like thing that was Who I Really Am, and I think that's bullshit.

Future Me: I see. What I meant is that you're an essentialist about personality characteristics, not about personalities.

Me: Huh. Ok, I'm listening.

Future Me: Imagine yourself as an algorithm in a neural network. (Have you read those parts of the Sequences yet? I think you probably have.) Can you picture that?

Me: Sure. There's a series of orange marble-like nodes with lots of wispy connections to other nodes. I use this image a lot. I am a brain, after all.

Future Me: Oh right, you're all about "association networks" for mnemonics. I never realized that's where this understanding came from. Ok, so tell me about association networks. What happens when you think of a "horse"?

Me: A group of nodes representing "horse" fires, and the things that are highly connected to the "horse" cluster are likely to fire. Strongly connected ones, such as "hung like a horse", are more likely to fire than weakly connected ones, such as "horseradish".

Future Me: Suppose your ability to do the Shim Sham dance steps is a result of having strengthened the right series of connections in your association network.

Me: startled pause of realization I've been thinking of "associations" as limited to "experiences".

Future Me: But experiences affect behavior, don't they. And most of the things that happen in your brain don't make it to the conscious level. Your association network is firing all the time -

Me: And when I do the Shim Sham, I don't have to think about it anymore because I've strengthened the connections through repetition so thoroughly that the right series of nodes fires in the right order without my attention ever focusing on that process. The only thing that makes it to my attention is a feeling of effortlessness and satisfaction as I move.

Future Me: I'll give you a minute to process the implications.

pause

Me: That's what a skill looks like in a neural network isn't it.

Future Me: Uh huh.

Me: And not just a physical skill whose output is movement. Mental skills are the same way. They just output further cognitive processes instead.

Future Me: Yep.

Me: This is all very interesting, but what does it have to do with my boring conversation with PIP and my relationship with empathy?

Future Me: Empathy is a collection of skills.

Me: You're going to have to spell it out more than that.

Future Me: Highly empathetic people have developed very strong pathways through their minds that input certain social experiences and output certain emotions. Or perhaps they were born with brains organized like that. Contrast this to your "swirling soup of personality traits" model.

Me: Your version involves a manipulable causal mechanism. It suggests I can identify and strengthen key associations and end up with new patterns of thought and behavior without gaining "empathy" all at once as an essential personality trait. Just like when I memorize stuff.

Future Me: You can indeed. Let me tell you an interesting fact about my current self. In the past week, I've had three one-on-one conversations. They happened on different days. Two of them were with people you've tried and failed to interact with productively before. All of them were over an hour long, and one lasted an entire afternoon. I agreed to these meetings because they seemed like fun. In the moment, they were fun. At no point did I feel any of the things you're currently feeling toward PIP. No boredom, no exhaustion, no trapped feelings, no annoyance, no wishing I were somewhere else. Instead I mostly felt a wide range of positive emotions. That thing that causes other people to want to interact with each other on purpose? There's a very good chance I felt that.

Me: That's... astonishing. It's hard to believe that happened to me. I honestly cannot imagine what that might have been like.

Future Me: Haha, you can, actually. You just don't have a lot of practice imagining being other people from the inside. Even future versions of yourself.

Me: And you say this startling change is caused by strengthening neural pathways comprising empathy?

Future Me: Yep.

Me: How? I'm not seeing that.

The sound of the party returns, and everything plays backward again for a moment.

PIP: Cool! What did you teach?

Me: I taught people how to deliberately strengthen associations between ideas. If you want to remember "pen" and "orange juice", you explain to System 1 that pens and orange juice have a relationship it considers extremely important.

PIP: You mean like a funny story involving a pen and some orange juice?

Me: That would work. "Funny" and "story" are both things System 1 pays attention to. There are a lot of other things it pays attention to as well, like hedonic rewards, rhyme and rhythm, and strong emotions of almost any kind. Primed with the techniques "funny" and "story", I'm currently imagining a puddle of orange juice and a pen trying to walk to the store together. Though the pen's just hopping right along, the orange juice is struggling to keep up because every time it manages to gather itself into a solid shape, it collapses back onto the pavement with wet squishy sounds. The pen is exasperated by this inefficiency and is trying to drag the orange juice along, but there's not really anything to hold on to and it doesn't like the smell of oranges. The orange juice feels guilty that it can't keep up with the pen. And then... well, stuff like that.

PIP: laughing I'm definitely going to remember "orange juice" and "pen" now! I don't know why I'd want to but I bet if you see me in a year and ask me what goes with "orange juice" I will know.

Everything freezes again.

Future Me: I would like to point out that you just experienced your model of the puddle of orange juice so vividly that you became uncomfortable and ended the story.

Me: ...Maaaaybe.

Future Me: You totally did. I was there. You felt it struggling to pull itself together and you felt a whole complex bundle of unpleasant emotions when the pen started yelling at it.

Me: Yeah ok fine.

Future Me: How do you think PIP is feeling right now?

Me: Um, I'm not sure. I hadn't considered it.

Future Me: Yeah I know. That's ok. Consider it.

Me: I guess maybe he's feeling sort of happy, and probably nervous to be talking to me.

Future Me: Whatever you did to generate that answer, did the process involve feeling any of those emotions? Or even simulating them as more than abstract ideas?

Me: I... don't think so. They just seem like the most likely things given the context and his body language and so on.

Future Me: Correct me if I'm wrong. (I'm not.) You pretty much see everybody as mindless walking bags of meat.

Me: Well no I don't actually think that -

Future Me: I know you don't think it. What you explicitly think is that their internal experiences are as rich and interesting as your own. But your models of them are not nearly as rich in emotion or sensory experience as your model of the orange juice or the pen.

Me: That makes me sound like a terrible person. Not that it's inaccurate.

Future Me: Whether you're a terrible person is irrelevant. You're thinking in essentialist terms about personality traits again. Tell me what is fun about walking bags of meat.

Me: Nothing. Bags of meat are boring.

Future Me: That they are. System 1 does not find walking bags of meat the least bit important.

Me: You're saying that if I could use the same processes to model conversation partners that I use to model orange juice, then people would suddenly feel a lot more interesting.

Future Me: It seems to be working pretty damn well for me so far.

Me: I see. I'm... not sure I know how to do that.

Future Me: I'm sure you don't. It'll take about two months of practice.

Me: jawfloor Two months is not a long time.

Future Me: Well you'll have developed the method first, and that part will take a lot longer. But since this is a fictional reenactment of something that never happened, I'm going to cheat and get you started right now. The first step is curiosity.

Me: That seems to be the case for an awful lot of things.

Future Me: Verily. I'm still not quite sure what that's about, but I'm pretty sure it's important. Anyway, you don't know it yet, but you spend a fair amount of time being curious about people.

Me: If I don't know it, how do you?

Future Me: The next thing you need to learn is how to identify high-leverage intervention points in your default cognitive patterns. Places in a string of firings where you can intervene to strengthen one crucial connection over another. I identified "curiosity about other people" as a high-leverage intervention point, and started paying attention to sensations of curiosity about other people.

Me: How can you pay attention to something that's below the level of conscious awareness?

Future Me: You can't. But you can build bridges that draw it up toward conscious awareness. For example, close your eyes, and tell me the color of the paint on the walls.

Me: I'm... not sure. Blue maybe?

Future Me: Now open your eyes and look around.

Me: They're pink. I definitely saw them but their color failed to register. Your point is that... No, I'm not quite sure what your point is.

Future Me: My point is that if I hadn't said anything, you'd have gone through the whole party seeing the color of the walls and not being aware of it. But I prompted you to search for your experience of the color of the walls in future consciousness. I flagged that experience as important, and flagging things as important, as something to watch for, does two things. I'm not quite sure how it does them. But it both leads your attention to the experiences you're searching for, and it probably causes you to have more of them (you'll spend more time looking at the walls when you're trying to find out what color they are).

Me: I can become aware of things that usually remain beneath the level of conscious awareness just by paying attention to them.

Future Me: Exactly. And you've just dismissed a thought about observation bias because you know it's not actually relevant. Good job. Now look around the room at all of these people, and when you notice anything even vaguely like a feeling of curiosity about any of them, tap your fingers together.

Me: Looks around. Sees someone who looks familiar. Taps fingers.

Future Me: What happened right before you tapped your fingers?

Me: I wondered whether I'd seen that girl over there in person before, or if she'd just commented on my Facebook wall at some point. But I think I only wondered it because you primed me to be curious about people.

Future Me: That will often be the case: You'll only notice the thing you're watching for when you're explicitly thinking about the fact that you're watching for it. You might only do the thing you're watching for because you're thinking about it. That's ok. It still strengthens the relevant pathways. Surprisingly quickly, in my experience. Empathy took a comparatively long time. Other cognitive habits I've learned by this method took a couple weeks or even days.

Me: So I just... tap my fingers whenever I'm curious about somebody?

Future Me: Yep. For now. I started with trying to tap my fingers whenever I noticed that I was experiencing empathy, but this turned out to be a prerequisite. You'll eventually realize that you've been trying to answer your curiosity about people by making System 2 inferences about their external appearance and behaviors, and that you get a lot farther a lot faster if you activate System 1 the way you do while making mnemonic associations and then just let it do the thing it evolved to do.

Me: Wouldn't that give me a lot of wrong answers? I mean, people are complicated. If I project a bunch of rich experiences into their heads I'm going to be mostly wrong most of the time.

Future Me: Yes, but you're not going to forget that while you're doing it. Also it's not exactly the same as "projecting a lot of rich experiences". There are extremely important sensations of "possibility" and "uncertainty". You'll see. And you're also going to be able to update your models way more quickly.

Me: looks incredulous

Future Me: That shouldn't surprise you; you'll be sticking your neck out and making riskier predictions. Furthermore, you really did evolve to model the minds of other humans accurately enough to predict incredibly complex behaviors. Those instinctive tools are a hell of a lot more powerful and accurate than you currently realize. Do you remember the second time you took Val's Againstness class, the one where you didn't have social anxiety?

Me: Yeah, that was super weird. He had somebody stand in front of the group and asked them to do something uncomfortable, like sing "happy birthday", while relaxing. Then he just watched them and told them all about their internal experiences based on ridiculously subtle external cues of anxiety or concern or whatever. And I predicted everything he said before he said it.

Future Me: Yep. You were doing the thing. You let System 1 be in charge of modeling the other person.

Me: Why do you think I was able to do that?

Future Me: Probably you were hypnotized.

Me: Heh, well Val was in the room, so yeah probably.

Future Me: Anyway, do the curiosity thing first. Tap your fingers when you're curious about other people. I'll get back to you.

sounds start again

PIP: laughing I'm definitely going to remember "orange juice" and "pen" now! I don't know why I'd want to but I bet if you see me in a year and ask me what goes with "orange juice" I will know.

Me: It's not unlikely. It depends a lot on how strong your emotional response to the story was. But I suppose - taps fingers - this is your first big party in the Bay Area right? First time meeting a bunch of people you've wanted to meet for a long time? You're probably already in a context where your emotions will solidify a lot of memories. ...Hey, snaps fingers, can I ask you something sort of personal?

PIP: Sure!

Me: What are you feeling right now?

PIP: Um... sort of nervous, excited, extremely happy, slightly drunk, worried about how you're judging me, concerned I won't display enough introspective skill in this answer to gain your respect, a few other things that aren't as obvious right now.

Me: Heh. I love it that you can answer that so transparently. Rationalists are great.

PIP: I've read some of your things about Tell Culture. I consider you one of my allies, so I want to be as transparent to you as possible.

Me: That's... really incredibly touching, actually. Thank you.

PIP: smiles

scene freezes

Me: That was... different.

Future Me: How was it different?

Me: When I noticed I was curious about him, I found that I cared more about his answer, that I paid more attention to what it meant.

Future Me: To get the next part I had to practice just this "noticing curiosity about other people" thing for a month. But if I can selectively freeze time, then I can also accelerate your learning process. Let's put your brain in a state where it's mastered noticing curiosity about people, and pick up from there.

a small popping sound

Me: Woah...

scene unfreezes

PIP: smiles

Me: taps fingers Why do you want to save the world?

PIP: That's an interesting question!

scene freezes

Future Me: Tell me what happened just before you snapped your fingers.

Me: I wondered why he wanted to save the world.

Future Me: What was it like to wonder why he wanted to save the world? What was happening in your head that you translated into the words "I wondered why he wanted to save the world"?

Me: I imagined him doing tasks for CFAR, I imagined him sitting in front of a computer coding and then donating money to FHI, I imagined him smiling while doing these things, and I felt an emotional sensation I want to call a "question mark".

Future Me: What is it like to know why I want to save the world?

Me: If you haven't changed too much, you have feelings of joy and fulfillment when you imagine tiling the universe with flourishing sentience, and you have feelings of loss and despair when you imagine none of that sentience coming to exist.

Future Me: When you thought about PIP wanting to "save the world", you had a visual simulation of his body going about world-saving tasks, and you imagined a smiling facial expression. You then thought about me wanting to "save the world". What's the crucial difference?

Me: I imagined you from the inside, and him from the outside!

Future Me: Yes.

Me: With him, it's like I'm interacting with his mechanical interface. I think that even my model of him is actually mostly of his mechanical interface. When I wonder about him, when I feel curiosity, it doesn't penetrate his exterior. taps fingers

Future Me: What was that tap for?

Me: I just wondered what it's like to be PIP from the inside. What it's like to be the thing that produces all of those behaviors and experiences all of those situations. What internal experiences motivate the activities of the mechanical interface. I wondered who is inside the machine.

Future Me: What's it like, the kind of curiosity that penetrates the exterior?

Me: The question mark sensation is there again, but I also have this almost spacial sensation where my attention is located about where his head is, and it's flipped to look out from that perspective at the world. There's a feeling of... not of specific emotions, but of something like the possibility of emotions, and the possibility of other kinds of experiences. And now I'm automatically starting to try to answer the question of what it's like to be him, and I'm filling in the "possibilities" with specific emotions and experiences, and I'm experiencing those things as I do it in just the way that I experience my memory palace when I walk around in it. It's all actually there in my head.

Future Me: Congratulations! You are empathizing.

Me: Really?

Future Me: I think so. You're doing the thing that I do when I interact with people and feel the human connection that makes interactions worth having. Call it whatever. You're imagining him as a person, instead of a walking sack of meat.

Me: It's a little bit difficult and uncomfortable.

Future Me: It takes practice. ... Though not for you, I guess.

another small popping sound

Me: ...I know Kung Fu.

Future Me: grins Show me.

Me: So you want me to start tapping my fingers when I notice I'm empathizing?

Future Me: Yep.

Me: I can do that.

Future Me: How would you feel about it if I left you alone at this party to talk to some random rationalist you've never met before?

Me: I'd... I'd like that, actually. I really want to know more about him. More about what's inside his head, I mean. It would be fun to try to learn. looks around I'd probably like to talk with any of these people, really.

Future Me: That's what I thought. I'll leave you to it then.

scene unfreezes

It's a fairly common practice among rationalists I'm familiar with to train epistemic calibration by making predictions, quantifying their confidence in those predictions, tracking their success rates, and betting actual money with each other along the way. The idea is that with repeated practice, you'll eventually get a gut sense that "sensation x", which you used to associate with "80% certainty", actually occurs more reliably in the presence of 60% probability predictions than 80% probability predictions. That is, 60% of the time when you feel "80% certain", the prediction comes true, and this eventually cause that to sensation to feel like 60% certainty instead of 80% certainty.

I'm going to call this approach "the observation correlation calibration formulation" (because I can). [The Credence Game] (http://acritch.com/credence-game/) allows rapid-fire execution of the the observation correlation calibration formulation.

But there's a second approach to epistemic calibration that I don't hear people talk about so much, and I think at this point in my development, it's more valuable to me.

From Luke's summary of How To Measure Anything:

"Suppose you’re asked to give a 90% CI for the year in which Newton published the universal laws of gravitation, and you can win $1,000 in one of two ways:

1) You win $1,000 if the true year of publication falls within your 90% CI. Otherwise, you win nothing.

2) You spin a dial divided into two “pie slices,” one covering 10% of the dial, and the other covering 90%. If the dial lands on the small slice, you win nothing. If it lands on the big slice, you win $1,000.

If you find yourself preferring option #2, then you must think spinning the dial has a higher chance of winning you $1,000 than option #1. That suggest your stated 90% CI isn’t really your 90% CI. Maybe it’s your 65% CI or your 80% CI instead. By preferring option #2, your brain is trying to tell you that your originally stated 90% CI is overconfident.

If instead you find yourself preferring option #1, then you must think there is more than a 90% chance your stated 90% CI contains the true value. By preferring option #1, your brain is trying to tell you that your original 90% CI is under confident."

I call that the Simulation Calibration Formulation, and I think it's brilliant. Especially the part about how to identify underconfidence. It's relatively easy to humbly admit your overconfidence, but dropping your credence after that by exactly the right amount is hard.

I haven't tested this, but I expect I'd gain skill more quickly through a rapid-fire Simulation session than through a rapid-fire Observation Correlation session. You can also do a calibration simulation in any real-life instance where you might otherwise make a bet.

I think the Observation Correlation method assumes either that you already have pretty good reflective awareness of your credence-related subjective experiences, or more likely that reflective awareness of those experiences isn't all that important. Especially in the online-training version of Observation Correlation, improvement is expected to happen below the level of awareness. It's a quiet shifting of gut feelings.

I think reflective awareness of credence experiences is probably hugely beneficial. The simulation method trains exactly that, making it a good candidate for something earlier in a calibration training program than the observation method.

The other reason I suspect it should come before observation is that it isn't tied up with social feelings like wanting to protect your reputation or social stigmas surrounding gambling, or personal insecurities related to intelligence and ego. In the moments of real-world prediction and prediction-checking, any of those sensations is likely to be so salient that it blots out credence feelings both at and below conscious awareness. And when you turn out to be wrong, you'll probably be punished (in a behavioral psychology sense) for making a prediction in the first place, if you're not already very skilled.

If I'm right about these things, then it would be wise to practice Simulation Calibration until the mental movements of balancing overconfidence and underconfidence are fast, easy, and nearly automatic, and to do that before you get really serious about Prediction Book or similar things. At that point, you'll be armed with sharper phenomenological weapons to cut through counterproductive ego preservation/20th century science virtue ethics of skepticism, and you'll actually be able to hear your "80% confidence" feeling ringing clear above the noise. You'll know what you're listening for, and you'll store the feelings in memory for later comparison.

You can practice this offline using the Credence Game I mentioned before, performing the simulation for each question, and not keeping score. When that gets easy, pay attention to the score again. And when that's easy, stop doing the simulation.

I don't mean that you should stop making real-world predictions if calibration simulation isn't easy yet. I just mean that early on, Simulation should be the focus of your epistemic calibration training, rather than Observation. I'm certainly going to make it the focus of mine.

On March 14th, 2015, Eliezer Yudkowsky will post the final chapter of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. If you've not read it, now would be an especially good time to start. If you have, you might want to join one of the many HPMOR Wrap Parties organized all over the world in celebration. I was asked to share a story at the Berkeley Wrap Party of how HPMOR has impacted my life, so if you plan to be there, you might want to hold off on reading this yourself. It does not contain specific spoilers for the book.

Even though I thought I wanted to be an an astronomer or a cosmologist growing up; even though my dad taught me to chart the movements of Jupiter's moons when I was ten; even though I read classic science fiction with first contact, generation ships, and interstellar empires; even though my family's trip to visit the VLA Radio Astronomy Observatory in Nevada was practically a religious pilgrimage for me; even so, the stars have always been abstractions. I didn't know that, of course. I understood what the stars were, intellectually, and I thought I understood what they meant. But when I looked up at the sky, they were still little holes in a great black dome to my emotions.

To put it mildly, Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality has been a powerful catalyst in my life. I read it for the first time about two and a half years ago, and I haven't the time to summarize all that's happened since then. But I think I can tell you what, specifically, began it all: HPMOR made me feel the meaning of the stars.

I was at my dad's house in the middle of the country in Southern Indiana. I'd been reading the Humanism arc, and I'd gotten to about chapter 47. It was my first read-through, so I'd not slept in a while, and I'd reached the point where my eyes just couldn't focus on the page any longer. It was 3AM. As my mind was in no state for sleep, I went outside for some fresh air, and I sat down at the picnic table and poured a glass of cider. I listened to the crickets and peeping frogs, and watched the fireflies glittering at the edge of the forest.

And then I looked up -

- and if I'd not been sitting down, I would have fallen over. What I saw was the Milkey Way, only it wasn't above me. I wasn't looking up at all. I was on its outskirts looking in. And I suddenly felt, as surely as the ground beneath my feet, that I was stuck to the surface of a giant rock covered in trees and bugs and people, falling forever around a star.

And although I knew the lights were ancient, I felt I was seeing the future. Over there - right there, I could point straight at it! - across the terrifying empty distance I'd never really tried to comprehend, was a future home of our civilization. I felt that the stars, that night, were not pretty pinpricks in a black velvet dome, but beacons blazing across the cold and dark, calling from across the centuries. And I knew it is up to us, the original inhabitants of Ancient Earth, to answer.

I knew, then, that I would never again see the night sky the way I had in the past. What I did not yet know is that I'd never see anything else the same way, either.

Summary

Habit: Fluidity

Duration: 35 Days

Success: 5/10

Trigger: A clinging-grasping sensation plus fear of a rending-jarring sensation associated with anticipation of interruption, or a clinging-grasping-rending-jarring sensation all at once associated with interruptions or violations of plans.

Action: Run my simulation past the desire/reality comparison to answer the question, "How should I respond to this?", then perform a small relinquishment-like flowing motion to make that response more natural than continuing as though the interruption didn't exist.

Result:

The easiest result to pinpoint is that I no longer experience anxiety about anticipated interruptions or plan violations, or if I do they're very mild and brief. I might be spending more time on contingency plans than is optimal, since my new response is "and what will I do if that happens?", but it's still a dramatic improvement.

I also experience very little discomfort from actual interruptions and plan violations beyond what seems to me to reflect damage done by the interruption. If I'm in the middle of solving a puzzle when my phone rings, I experience brief clinging-like displeasure at the expectation that it will be difficult to pick up where I left off, or that the new object of attention won't be as fun as the one I've had to abandon, but the rending-jarring sensation that once was like nails on a chalkboard is now almost entirely absent.

I took two points off of my score because when I'm very tired and stressed, I still have anti-fluidity reactions, which are about half as frequent and about half as intense as before. The other three points represent my estimation of the distance between my proficiency with fluidity under normal conditions and complete mastery of this skill.

Interactions With Previous Habits

I think I've gained a generalized resilience skill, so this seems a good time to talk about how I distinguish cognitive skills from cognitive habits.

When I say "skill", I'm emphasizing performance, the things that happen in the outside world as a result of what you can do with your mind. By "skill" I mean "a capacity to influence the outside world in certain ways".

If you are skilled in traditional bowyery, you can turn lengths of wood into efficient bows that fire arrows without breaking. If you are skilled in epistemic callibration, you can turn beliefs about the world into predictions that turn out to be true about as often as you expect them to.

When I say "habit", I'm emphasizing mental motions, the things you do with your mind, regardless of what might happen outside of your mind as a result. Specifically, I mean the thoughts and feelings that fire as automatic reflexes in response to stimuli.

In part, cognitive habits constitute cognitive skills.

[This bit ended up being a whole lot longer than planned. I'll post an in-depth discussion of cognitive skills vs. habits of thought in the next few days.]

Notes On the Installation Procedure

Due to the getting sick, moving, officiating a wedding, and getting sick again, all in rapid succession, I was far less careful and reflective this time than the last. After my first success in responding well to the trigger, I stopped using the knitting counter almost completely, and engaged in no offline training at all. By "engaged in no offline training", I mean that I didn't set aside any time to think about the project, didn't write about it, didn't meditate on it, and didn't artificially create rapid-fire opportunities to practice. All I did was become slightly reflective when I noticed something that felt like it might be the trigger, and respond with whatever felt like it might be the thing I'd trained myself to do. That went on for about three weeks.

I'm taking this as evidence that I reach a point of diminishing returns after I start to put effort into things besides noticing triggers I've identified (where by "noticing" I mean "entering reflective attention"). I'm even wondering whether merely being aware of my tiny mental mistakes as mistakes while they're happening will lead to automatic experimentation with responses regardless of whether I've done any planning or whether I have spare cycles to think hard about what's happening as it's going on. If I can get most of the benefit of this procedure just from deliberate noticing, that would be excellent.

I'm going to test that with my next habit. I'll do the usual things up front to prepare for training, but after that I'll just practice noticing and see what happens.

Next Up

The next skill I want to work on has something to do with compassion. I think that with resilience greatly strengthened, my new bottleneck has to do with how difficult I find it to convince System 1 that other people actually exist as people, rather than as non-sentient meat puppets.

This is not coming from a place of "it's good to be compassionate", but from a place of "my ability to learn and grow is severely limited by my lack of interest in/enjoyment of what would otherwise be opportunities to learn from others, support my mental health through socialization, and strengthen the people I regularly interact with in ways that clearly advance my values".

I don't yet have a concrete understanding of what this skill is exactly, in terms of what influence I want to have over the world - let alone what specific cognitive habits will be at the core of it. Reporting on that and planning the next part of my training will be an upcoming post.

Log

1/23-24/2015

For Round 2, I’m going to tackle a specific kind of cognitive inflexibility.
I’ve long been very dependent on routines. When I have a plan or an expectation, I don't tend to handle violations of it very well. I don't like unexpected things happening, at least when they entail a change of plans. I think the next step in acquiring Resilience is becoming much more flexible in this respect.

(The previous step, “Growing the Roses Of Success”, was learning to respond more productively to failures or mistakes.)

I did a few tests of executive function via Quantified Mind to make sure there aren’t large problems there that I should be aware of, and my scores look pretty ok to me. I don’t have data on the general population, but none of the tasks was super difficult, anyway. I don’t think this is a totally general cognitive inflexibility issue. I think it’s fairly isolated, and that I’ll see results just from learning to apply my pre-existing capacity for flexibility to the weak areas.

If that happens to end up improving my overall executive functioning, maybe I’ll see it when I repeat the tests later. I doubt that’ll happen, but I might as well try it.

Time for Prep Work!

1. Be able to generate concrete examples of successes and failures to apply the skill.
   • Example of failure: I'm writing right now, and I planned to spend this pomodoro writing. In fact, in terms of my emotions, my plan is to continue writing indefinitely, and anything that stops that before my plan naturally changes will upset me. But I'm hungry. I know that I'm going to have to stop writing to eat. Possibly even in the middle of this pomo. And I don't like that. It's absolutely necessary that I eat. It's obviously a good idea. I will do better work later if I eat. But current me's plans will have to change, and that hurts.
     
     Preferred outcome: When I notice I’m hungry and that my plan to keep writing is not optimal, I feel [positive things I’m not sure of yet], which smoothly motivates me to adopt the new plan of eating before returning to work.
   
   
   • Example of failure: I'm halfway through a cup of tea while reading in the morning and Eliezer wakes up and asks for breakfast. I feel a clinging grasping rending jarring feeling, which results in irritability, and I grudgingly make breakfast while wishing he’d stayed asleep through the end of my tea. I knew when I made the tea that he might wake up in the middle of it, and rather than being emotionally prepared for that, I spent the first half of the tea mildly anxious that I’d have to change my plan. I still feel some happiness and gratitude to be making breakfast for him, but it’s overshadowed by the other thing.
     
     Preferred outcome: I smoothly transition from tea to breakfast without a sense of loss and get to enjoy making breakfast without the irritability, then I reheat the tea after breakfast and continue reading ‘til I’m done with it (if that’s still a good idea).
   
   
   • Example of failure: The instructions on the back of the cookie mix are in Spanish and therefore have temperatures in Celsius and measurements in grams. My plan when I flipped over the cookie mix bag was to find some Fahrenheit number and preheat the oven to that, and to measure some fraction of a cup of butter to make the dough. I was even prepared for words like “taza” instead of “cup”. In fact, my oven is in Celsius and my stick of butter is in grams, so the Spanish instructions taped over the English ones are far more convenient. But I still feel the clinging grasping rending jarring feeling, because Celsius and grams were not part of the plan. Metric measurements are not The Way Things Are Supposed To Be. (According to my immediate emotional responses, that is. System 2 readily grants that metric is much better and English Standard is dumb. Except that it actually prefers base 12.)
     
     When things are other than The Way Things Are Supposed To Be, I feel cheated and irritable. I feel entitled to futures that go the way I expect them to, and when they don’t go that way I feel like someone has stolen the expected futures from me without permission.
     
     Preferred outcome: I see the metric measurements, remember that they’re more useful here anyway, and feel nothing but pleasant surprise. I don’t feel pain or irritability. I simply adjust.
     
     
   • Example of failure: I go to my favorite restaurant, where I always order a bottle of sparkling water. But this time, they don't have sparkling water. I immediately feel something like, "Now my whole experience of the meal is ruined."
     
     Preferred outcome: I recognize an opportunity to find out what my favorite meal taste like with a different drink, and instead of feeling like something’s been taken from me, I feel like I’ve been given a gift.
   
   
   • Example of failure: I go to the store with a grocery list that includes cheddar, and they don't have cheddar. I feel grumpy and sort of at a loss, and I maybe don’t even buy any cheese at all. (I have actually written “or some other cheese like colby or mozzarella if they don’t have cheddar” on my grocery list just to prevent that particular outcome.)
     
     Preferred outcome: Instead of clinging desperately to the details of my grocery list, I consider it more like a source of inspiration and freely depart from its details, playfully improvising when circumstances require.
   
   I feel like a Taoist *wu wei* water metaphor belongs here. The larger skill of resilience overall reminds me of supple willow branches bending in storms without breaking, but this kind of flexibility is a little more specific. This isn’t about storms, difficult things happening that I need to be able to deal with. This is just attachment to whatever I've declared the Should Universe. There’s nothing bad or difficult about the instructions being in Celsius when my oven is also in Celsius. Celsius just happens to be the shape of reality, and all of the difficulty comes from my own basically arbitrary rigidity. In fact, I think I’m going to re-name this habit “fluidity” instead of “flexibility” to capture that.


2. If a skill requires multiple habits, train them serially, and repeat step 1 for each individual habit.
   
   I think this is a single habit? Probably?
   
3. Clearly define at least one high-quality trigger for the proposed action before beginning to train that habit.
   
   I’ll start by learning to notice the clinging grasping rending jarring feeling, but I’ll work toward identifying whatever precedes that so I can learn to prevent it.
   
   
4. Seek opportunities to practice.
   
   I don’t expect this to be necessary because of how frequently my plans are violated. I logged seven instances between 3PM and 7PM yesterday. But I can always just spread out CoZE training if needed.


5. Train triggers before actions.
   
   Clicker’s armed and ready. Though I logged seven yesterday, I’m officially starting this part today since I didn’t get going on it ‘til 3PM before.


6. Test a variety of actions if required.
   
   The default first action to try is hypnosis, since it may happen automatically with the prep work and noticing part. I’ll start listing possible actions during offline training when the time comes.
   
   
7. Maintain an offline training routine.
   
   Here are some things offline training might include for this habit.
   • MEA for Feeling Clearly:I’ll do this if I encounter trouble with noticing.
   • CoZE: Comfort Zone Expansion, aka exposure therapy. I need to find ways to drill plan changes that just barely make me uncomfortable.
   • Urge Propagation: I need to explain to System 1 why the trigger means good things instead of bad things, and what exactly those good things are. This will probably help me transition to the preferred emotional reaction, and the propagator will probably involve water.
   • Responding In Advance: I haven’t written a blog post about this yet because it needs more field testing. But all I mean by “responding in advance” is 1) simulating the trigger, default response, and preferred response in detail, then 2) reasoning about how the worlds where I end up on causal pathways toward the preferred outcome differ from the ones where I head toward the the default outcome. Thence I obtain interventions to test.

1/24/2015

4 clicks

1/25/2015

8 clicks so far today, all retrospective, though about half were just moments after the event.

Catching something about Eliezer's body language out of the corner of my eye, I noticed myself anticipating an interruption while I was reading. I had a distinct feeling of trying to push that reality away while hiding from it, distancing myself, like I could make it not come to be if I hoped hard enough. (Turns out I read him wrong and he just kept writing.)

Immediately after noticing the feeling, I felt curiosity about what would be better to feel at that time, given that I might indeed be interrupted but I couldn't be sure of it. How would I prefer to respond to anticipation of interruption?

I don't have an answer yet, but my past experience suggests that asking the question in real time is the fifth milestone in habit installation. (Since you're probably wondering at this point: The first milestone is using mid- or long-term memory to notice that you missed a chance to notice the trigger. The second is noticing you missed the trigger while it's fresh in working memory. The third is noticing the trigger as it's happening. The fourth is noticing your default response to the trigger as it's happening. The fifth is seeking a better response while the default response to the trigger is happening. The sixth is testing a specific alternative response upon noticing the trigger in real time.)

(PS I made up that list of milestones just now but it's been swimming around in my brain for weeks slowly putting itself together.)

1/26/2015

4 clicks, but I missed a bunch of opportunities to click. There was an ant invasion first thing in the morning, which put me in a bad mood and I had an awful day. I usually have tea first thing in the morning, so this was an especially unpleasant surprise interruption of routine. For a couple hours after I killed most of the ants, there were stragglers I kept having to get up to squish. I decided to only click once for the entire ant invasion fiasco, but I definitely experienced my trigger (the clinging grasping rending jarring feeling)for every stray ant, and if I'd clicked for all of them there'd have been dozens.

Also: I encountered the trigger at an epistemic update instead of a change in plans. I wasn't sure whether to click for that, but I cast my net wide in the early stages of training so I clicked.

In the middle of the period where I was periodically squishing stray ants, Eliezer figured out how to operate the microwave correctly. I'd been making due with the mysterious, apparently randomly spaced time settings that happen when you push one button, and he discovered that if you first set the power by pushing another button, you can then set the time to the second. This is useful information that makes my life easier, and he explained it to me.

I resisted. I updated immediately, not rationalizing to support my previous beliefs about the microwave or making excuses for my having been wrong, but I felt the very same clinging grasping rending jarring that I feel when something doesn't go as planned. I felt he'd stolen something that had belonged to me.

The epistemic version of this is definitely more dangerous and more important to address, but I think that the epistemic version almost never happens to me anymore. I spent several months toward the beginning of 2013 focusing on relinquishment (qua rationalist virtue). I think it worked, and these days I mostly only resist updates in this way when I'm extremely irritable. I think that the planning version is a much larger obstacle for me at this point, so I'm not going to change focus.

Still, this is not the first time I've noticed an opportunity to train a terribly important habit of thought whose trigger occurs much too rarely for the current installation procedure to work. This one happens to be really spread out because I've already taken a lot of skillpoints in relinquishment. But I'm sure that some crucial rationality skills are by their very nature high impact/low frequency. My model of how to train habits of thought can't be complete until I've developed a different approach for those longer-term habits.

The immediate practical implication of this observation is that I need to make my trigger slightly more specific to avoid firing at the wrong times. Now it will be a clinging grasping rending jarring temporal feeling, so the same as before but with a sensation of the loss of a possible future.

1/27/2015

4 clicks

1/28/2015

4 clicks

1/29/2015

4 clicks

All right, I'm not satisfied with how this is going. It's been a week, and I'm still only clicking retrospectively. (By "clicking retrospectively", I mean that I click when I noticed that I missed a chance to notice the trigger.)

I cast my net wide at the beginning of clicker training, so at first I click for all of the following:

1. Remembering a past event from the current day and inferring that the trigger probably happened. Example: A memory of preparing lunch comes to my attention. I remember that I planned to make chicken salad, but discovered that the lettuce had gone bad. My memory of it isn't detailed enough to include my internal emotional state at the time, but I think that I probably felt the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal feeling I'm watching for. I click the knitting counter.
2. Remembering a past event from the current day and knowing that the trigger happened because it's included in the memory. Example: A memory of preparing lunch comes to my attention. I remember that I planned to make chicken salad, but discovered that the lettuce had gone bad. I also remember the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation I experienced upon discovering the rotten lettuce. I click the knitting counter.
3. I reflect on the event that just happened, and discover an instance of the trigger still hanging out in my working memory. Example: I'm in the process of putting together an alternate lunch plan shortly after having discovered that the lettuce is rotten. I've switched gears and am moving forward now instead of clinging to my violated expectations, but when I recall the past few minutes, the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation is still fresh in my mind, and a shadow of it still colors my immediate experience.
   
   (In other words, I'm not still feeling it, but my attention never fully left it as it moved from immediate sensation to very recent memory. My thoughts about it have been continuous. To know what this is like, try paraphrasing the three bullet points you've read so far without re-reading them, then try paraphrasing a paragraph of something you read a few hours ago without re-reading it. Detail at the level of paragraphs or sentences is possible for information still contained in working memory, but that level of detail seldom makes it to long-term memory, and you'll probably have trouble giving more than a rough outline or your overall impression of the thing you read a few hours ago.)
4. I notice that the trigger is in the process of happening. Example: I'm standing in front of the fridge holding the rotten lettuce and feeling the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal feeling associated with my violated lunch plans. I notice that what I'm feeling is the trigger I've been watching for, and I click the knitting counter as it's happening.

So basically I'm still in parts one and two of clicker training after a week. This pace is probably necessary for some skills. I'd expect more patience to be necessary when the triggers are especially subtle or are just barely frequent enough for this installation procedure to be effective. But I don't want to assume that this is such a skill when I don't have enough information yet to distinguish lots-of-patience-requiring habits from habits that install quickly when I do everything right. So I'm going to change things and see what happens.

One of my hypotheses is that I've inadvertently trained the trigger of remembering missed opportunities to notice the original trigger, and that new trigger has solidified so that it's no longer pointing me toward the experience I want to notice. If this is what's going on, I could stop clicking for situations of types 1 and 2 and look only for 3 and 4. If this works, then I'll experiment with different widths of the net I cast at the beginning of habit training for the next few habits.

I don't expect that to work, though. I expect it to just lower my daily clicker score to zero. But it's a cheap test so it's what I'm going to try for tomorrow. If my clicker score is zero I'll test the next hypothesis, and if it's one or higher I'll keep going. If the average remains three or lower for more three days in a row, I'll test the next hypothesis.

Hypothesis two is that the simulated subjective experience I have stored in my brain as the trigger is insufficiently vivid, so actually experiencing the thing in real time does not fire an association with the fact of trigger-ness. If that's the case, I should spend one to five minutes first thing in the morning meditating on the mental state of the trigger.

Hypothesis three is that the trigger is simply too infrequent. The cheaper intervention to try for this is regular CoZE training, where I find a way to deliberately practice this particular thing many times in a solid block. The more expensive way, which I'll try if that doesn't work, is to artificially increase the frequency of the trigger through an intermittent form of CoZE training, which I'll need to design.

Hypothesis four is that I have the wrong trigger, and I need to come up with a better one.

Hm, I just felt the "anticipating an interruption" thing again. I don't have time to go into any more detail in this update right now, but I think I just became convinced that the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring-temporal sensation is actually a progression, and rending-jarring only happen when my anticipation of interruption/plan violation turn out to be correct. Yet the clinging-grasping is problematic and distracting, and my automatic response to it is to force it down. I need to examine this more carefully in the near future.

1/30/2015

7 clicks

1/31/2015

5 clicks

2/1/2015

4 clicks today.

I'm catching the trigger in real-time now. I don't know if it's because I stopped clicking retrospectively, or because I thought a lot about it and that caused automatic vivid simulation.

I've thought some more about the anticipation of the trigger thing. I felt it yesterday and happened to spontaneously respond well, specifically by running my simulation past the thing I feared and on to the best way to respond should the interruption happen. Having a preferred response in hand already, I feel like I should run with it.

I think this habit has two closely related triggers, and they're so closely related that I'm going to go ahead and try training them simultaneously.

The first trigger is anticipation of interruption or plan violation, and my default response to it is to think bad things at my simulation of the interruption, feeling as though that will prevent it from actually happening. That feels like the clinging-grasping plus fear of the rending-jarring.

The other trigger is what I've been talking about so far: clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, with a temporal element indicating an interruption or plan violation as opposed to a-temporal epistemic counterevidence. My default response to that is to dwell on the differences between what happened and what I wanted to happen, which prolongs the rending-jarring and prevents re-planning.

I'm going to try training these simultaneously not just because the triggers are so similar, but because it seems like the correct response might be the same in both cases.

New trigger-action plans:

If I feel the clinging-grasping sensation with fear of rending-jarring in the future, then I will run my simulation past the feared event to answer the question, "How should I respond to that?"

If I feel the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, then I will run my simulation past the present moment's anticipation/reality comparison to answer the question, "How should I respond to this?"

I could spend some extra off-line training time trying to pin down what precise mental motions will be required, but it seems like just trying it without worrying about how it'll play out avoids premature optimization.

2/2/2014

1 click.

2/3/2014

2 clicks.

2/4/2014

3 clicks.

Ants have been an ongoing battle here, as you may recall from my entry on Jan. 26th. I can keep them out, for the most part, as long as I spray a new line of Raid across the porch the moment I see an ant inside. If I fail to do that, the whole colony invades my kitchen while I sleep. I was spraying every two days for a while, and then they stopped for a whole month, and recently they've started again.

I was in the middle of a yin yoga session just now when I noticed an ant on the floor. I felt the trigger for an opportunity to practice fluidity--the clinging, grasping, rending, and jarring all at once--but before it could really get going, I successfully responded with the action I planned three days ago. "If I feel the clinging-grasping-rending-jarring all at once, then I will run my simulation past the present moment's anticipation/reality comparison to answer the question, 'How should I respond to this?'"

That plan included a prediction I hadn't verified in real time, but I did indeed experience two simultaneous simulations--the version of the present moment where there's no ant and I continue my yoga session, and the actual present moment where there's an ant and I have to decide what to do about it--and there was definitely a feeling of holding one against the other. There was something else I didn't predict, though, which was a movement toward something like rationalization. I felt myself checking to see if I could get away with behaving as though the preferred version of the present moment were the real one. (The "default response" I'd noted previously was just the looping present moment comparison.)

It was actually that rationalization-like movement that let me follow through with the trigger-action plan quite quickly. It was similar to the trigger for a habit I've already trained, namely relinquishment of false beliefs in the face of counter evidence, and the motion of fluidity is similar to relinquishment. So I ran my simulation past the present moment and toward the action I needed to take. It ouput "pause the yoga, kill the ant, spray the Raid, return to yoga".

That had an effect almost identical to "leaving a line of retreat". The epistemic version of leaving a line of retreat--visualizing the world as it would be if the thing you hope isn't true turned out to be true--makes fair assessment of probabilities easier. In this instrumental case, simulating what I needed to do, on its own terms without comparison to the Should Universe wherein abide My Plans, meant that a tiny little relinquishment-like flowing motion was enough to cause virtually painless follow through.

I think I've actually implemented this trigger-action plan successfully a few times now, but I've been sick and thus awfully low on concentration for the past few days. This is probably the first one accompanied by sufficient reflectivity for recording. I think that mastery of this skill probably entails zero pain in follow-through. I'm not sure if that's a realistic goal or not, but at this stage I might as well shoot for it. But I expect an 80/20 situation again.

It's interesting, this skill is exactly non-attachment as discussed in Zen, or at least its instrumental form. Not that it's a Zen-specific thing in Buddhism; I'm pretty sure this is also the heart of the third Theravada perfection, nekkhama, "renunciation". But it's always discussed, praised, illustrated. If there are instructions for training this specific thing, I've never seen them written down, nor heard them in a dharma talk. Despite having read about non-clinging and non-attachment over and over again across several years of Buddhist study, both academic and religious-ish, practical experience is so important for recognizing this kind of habit that I had no idea I was planning to train something I'd heard of before until I was actually in the middle of training it. I remain oh so curious about how targeted the curriculum for monks turns out to be in real life. There's a gulf between theory and wall-sitting, and I'm less convinced by the day that "more sitting" is in fact the most efficient bridge.

2/5/2014

2 clicks

2/25/2015

Formal training of fluidity got a little bumpy. I moved home from Chile, officiated a wedding, and got sick, without a break in between. My new context also caused me to wear different clothes, which made keeping the knitting counter on me all the time much more difficult. As a result, my training has been a lot less reflective.

But it's still been happening, and I'm sort of grateful for the opportunity to see what happens when I get the ball rolling and then let my attention stray elsewhere.

The most interesting result has been that fluidity and growing the roses have both blended and expanded to create what feels like a generalized resilience skill, which was indeed the goal, and I'm amazed that it's happened so quickly. It doesn't feel complete, but it's a tremendous improvement.

The expansion started out with clicking accidentally for growing the roses instead of fluidity. Then I started forgetting which was which, and just taking the right action instead of stopping to sort out which habit I was practicing. Then I started clicking for triggers that are phenomenologically similar to one of the habits, and intuiting the correct response as an extrapolation from fluidity and growing the roses. Now I seem to be practicing a spirit of resilience mostly unreflectively.

I think what's going on is that I've unconsciously tuned into a proto-trigger for every sort of interaction with the Should Universe. I think this because I'm responding differently to things that look like my established triggers from the outside, but are apparently completely different from the inside, at least once they've been going long enough for me to have become consciously aware of them.

For example, it used to be that when Eliezer delegated a task to me and I caused an outcome he didn't want, I would feel inadequate and sad, like I'd let him down and he must be disappointed in me. (Like maybe he asked me to make dinner and though I thought I did a perfectly good job, he likes his steaks medium well instead of medium rare, and I didn't know that. Just a toy example.) Often he'd have to either put up with the outcome he got or seek a different outcome himself, because I'd lost the ability to think productively about the issue.

Although from the outside that looks like a concurrence of the trigger for growing the roses (it's an instance of a personal failure, sort of) with the trigger for fluidity (I expected him to express satisfaction with the outcome, and he didn't), it *feels* different from both from the inside. Phenomenologically, my old default response here was a highly social emotion that was all about inadequacy, not a "surprise and trapped sinking sensation" or a "clinging grasping rending jarring sensation".

Since I've been back, I've noticed that my new response is to say, "Ok, how would you like it instead?" and to feel motivated to cause the other outcome. Note that that response is also different from either of the trained responses. The trained response to "surprise and trapped sinking" is nonchalant interest in what went wrong, an impulse to weigh whether it's worth trying to repair completely, and a motivation to make any cheap repairs that are available immediately. This is more like, "that's ok, I'll try something else or do it over again, even if it's sort of costly, 'cause that's what needs doing!". The trained response to "clinging grasping rending jarring" is to continue my simulation past the reality/preference comparison to play through "how should I respond to that?". I'm not noticing a "how should I respond to that?" query, just a complete automatic re-direction. (I notice that something is not quite right about the things I say in this paragraph, but I'm too sleepy to figure it out right now.)

Similar things have happened for "feeling grumpy about having to do something that I don't want to do" and "spending lots of energy on wishing that the world were otherwise even when the way it is is exactly how I expected it to be". I'm not sure I even *had* the thought "WHY DID I HAVE TO CATCH A COLD RIGHT BEFORE OFFICIATING THIS WEDDING?!" which is astonishing in retrospect.

So I think there must be a should-universe sensation that's so tiny I'm not even reflectively aware of it yet, and a fluidity-like mental motion that's so tiny I'm not aware of that either, and practicing a couple of habits that contain each of these was sufficient to train the fluidity-like thing in response to the should-universe thing as a generalized resilience skill.

This leads to meeting a wide range of adversities with far more flexibility and grace than I could have imagined just three months ago. It all feels very aikido: "Don't get in the way, just redirect momentum."

I feel like I'm at about 5/10 with resilience, so I have as far to go as I've come so far if I'm right about that. But the ball's still rolling, and it looks at this point like I'll keep improving regardless of whether I'm training formally.

Without Googling, what's your 95% confidence interval for the longest time spent in labor? Feel free to post it in the comments before reading on.

I just encountered this question on William MacAskill's Facebook wall. When I looked it up, after posting my answer, I discovered that my upper bound was off by a factor of 10.

I was reluctant to answer the question in the first place, but I didn't stop to examine why. It is now clear to me: When it's revealed that I'm extremely overconfident about something, my default response is shame and regret.

I used to respond much more strongly with shame and regret than I do now. I recall an occurrence of this reaction from about three years ago. The reaction was so strong that many vivid details of the context are readily available in memory. (Whether they're accurate is a separate question.) Robby and I were in the the pizzeria on Kirkwood sitting at a table by the door. It was raining. We were having bread sticks with cheese sauce, and he asked me, "What's your 90% confidence interval for when Reverend Bayes was born?"

Immediately I felt attacked and defensive. I did not know what a confidence interval was at the time, so he spent a few minutes explaining it to me. After that, he wanted me to answer, and I was so scared. I don't remember why, but I remember the feeling very well. I was terrified that I'd be way off, and that this test would reveal my embarrassing mistake. I answered anyway because I'd recently discovered Lesswrong, so I felt that this was a kind of question I was Supposed To answer if I wanted epistemic improvement. (The question was actually taken from a Lesswrong survey.) And I was definitely Supposed To know when Bayes was born!

Sure enough, I was way off. And sure enough, the shame flooded over me like a bucket of ice water. I felt terrible, and I regretted answering the question.

A lot of things have happened in the intervening time to lesson the shame response. I don't know what most of them are, but watching people I respect readily and casually test their predictions and reveal their mistakes has surely been part of it. Curing social anxiety also contributed, obviously.

It's not been enough, though. When I answered the labor question, I still felt enough of the shame to overshadow the recalibration going on beneath it. I did feel the recalibration as well, but it was subtle enough by comparison that if I hadn't been training mindfulness of this sort of mental motion in the recent past, I'd have missed it. And I certainly didn't catch the details.

That's a problem. I can't optimize a process I'm never aware of in real time. It doesn't matter how well I understand Bayesian updating when some other sensation is drowning out all my opportunities to apply my understanding.

You might think, "Ah, but those negative feelings are useful, because if you're punished for being overconfident then you might be less confident in the future!" What actually happens is that I'm less likely to put myself in situations that would reveal my overconfidence if it existed. Which shouldn't be surprising from a behavioral psychology perspective: The immediately preceding action was "answer calibration question", not "form a belief and establish a level of confidence in it".

If I were going to train a better reaction to calibration opportunities properly, I'd spend a few days studying my default reaction and becoming as mindful of it as possible. I'd also examine whether my default reaction suggested an emotional need of some sort that the optimal response ought to address, especially if my reaction were as strong now as it was three years ago. Only then would I begin considering possible interventions.

But this particular reaction seems to be in a class of habits that are very important but whose triggers are much too rare for the current version of the Tortoise Skills installation procedure. So instead, I'm going to try doing an abbreviated version of the procedure in case it turns out that I can get marginal improvements quickly from isolated cases like this.

My best guess at how I'd rather respond to discovering I'm extremely overconfident is about the same as the response I learned to have to failures. I'd like to feel nonchalant interest in my overconfidence. Further, I'd like that interest to inspire targeted curiosity about the cause of the overconfidence, and increased sensitivity to similar contexts or patterns of thought that might signal severe overconfidence if I encounter them when forming or considering other beliefs.

But the most important part is just letting go of the thing that drags me down into counterproductive emotions. A flavor of wu wei, maybe, of fluidity. My brain's pretty good, really, when I can keep from getting in its way. If I can just stop doing the stupid thing, I often don't need a brilliant solution on top of it.

I don't know how I do that "letting go of the dragging-downward" thing, but I do know that I've learned to do it at least once before. I'll plan to imagine Eliezer discovering overconfidence and his usual response, as a reminder that other responses are possible, in case I need some extra help.

So, here's the new trigger-action plan, which I will not train but will instead simply intend and await: If I notice that my overconfidence has been revealed, then I will loosen my grip on the downward-dragging sensations and direct my attention instead to even the tiniest sensation of reflective interest. If I have trouble with that, I will imagine how Eliezer would react in my place.

I've dramatically improved my workflow over the past month or so. I don't expect this exact formula to work for you, but working is *so* much more fun now that I feel like I've got to share, just in case somebody gets a small part of the benefit from one of these ideas.

Here is the formula I use today. I added each thing in succession, and each one improved my experience of working immediately and obviously.

1. Pomodoros. The pomodoro technique is a work schedule with 25 minute blocks separated by short breaks. I've worked in pomodoros off and on for a couple years, but until now I've used them on an as-needed basis. They've always been good for getting me through highly aversive work, but they've never felt like a boost to projects I don't mind working on. I seem to be pretty good at focusing and not procrastinating by default, so I think I had less to gain from pomodoros than a lot of people. For example, my instinctive response when I first heard about browser extensions that block distracting websites during work periods was "...why don't you just close those tabs?". (I understand why, it's just not how my brain works.) Pomos in a social context, though, have proved powerful for me.

2. The Less Wrong Study Hall is a Tinychat room where people work together silently, webcam broadcasting optional, in extended pomodoros of 32 minutes with 8 minute breaks. Chatting and being social during break times is encouraged, as are bragging about what you accomplished in the past pomo, seeking moral support during difficult projects, encouraging others, and announcing your intentions for the next work block. The password is lw. Social conventions for the room can be found here.

Breaks sometimes get a little silly:

I tried this expecting it not to work. I was really just curious, because I'd never tried anything like it. I'm a very introverted person, and when I had social anxiety I found video chat completely terrifying. I also don't tend to respond well to punishment-based motivation methods, and the original idea behind the LWSH was to create a sense of accountability to others who are watching you work (or something like that).

Instead, it seems to have restored a positive social element that I've been craving since I left college. Maybe I like people after all, but only when they're being quiet, productive, highly predictable, and completely independent of me. Those things happen all the time in libraries, coffee shops, and dorm lounges--at least on college campuses--but I've not encountered the combination in many other contexts.

Hanging out in a video chat room also seems to be breaking down my negative associations with video chat that accumulated during the years of social anxiety. I scheduled a Skype meeting the other day with zero discomfort, and I'm still not worried about it even though it's happening tomorrow. I also participated in a CFAR alum Google hangout a while back, and didn't feel even the tiniest twinge of anxiety.

3. Ambient sounds of rain, thunder, and a coffeeshop (with the voices as indistinct murmurs). I went through a a list of ambient websites trying out each, just because I happened upon the list and was curious, and found Rainy Cafe to be the best for me. It turned out to be on too short a loop, so I've switched to A Soft Murmur, which offers all three types of sounds as options to combine. (I think the loop here might also be too short, and I need to look for more alternatives, or maybe make my own track.) I've tried each of these sounds individually, and the combination works best. Like with the LWSH, I was surprised that the coffee shop sounds were a plus. They seem to increase my sense of comradery in the LWSH. When I shut off the cafe sounds, I suddenly feel slightly lonely, and work becomes less fun.

4. Complice is Malcolm Ocean's productivity startup. It targets a type of person I am not, so it didn't really work for me when I first tried it. I imagine it's great if you have trouble staying focused on your goals, acting in line with your priorities, and not procrastinating. I guess you could say I stand to gain from productivity vitamins, not productivity medicine.

But when he added Less Wrong Study Hall integration, that feature turned out to be a big boost for me. (He plans to make other similar rooms eventually.) It added to my experience of the LWSH more precise and automatic timing, the ability to see what other people are working on and to show others what I'm working on, a simple to-do list, and a visual reminder of how many pomos I've completed. Here's the LWSH as it appears in Complice at the moment.

5. Chocolate at the beginning of each pomo break. I tried a few different kinds, and of those the best for this purpose proved to be After Eight Mint Chocolate Thins. They have a distinctive flavor and texture that I can tie to pomos exclusively (unlike plain milk chocolate, which I'll encounter in many different situations), but I'm pretty sure their superiority is mostly about the packaging. (LOOK HOW PRETTY!!!)

The result of all these things together is that I look forward to getting to work, even if the project isn't all that interesting. I'm usually sad to stop working. Several times I've sat down to complete a single task, and ended up knocking out a bunch of things it would have been fine to do later, just because of the momentum.

Without any of these elements, I usually do about the minimum without a lot of trouble. Procrastination and distraction aren't big problems, but long work periods take a lot out of me, and I'm not motivated to do more than necessary.

My main workflow problem at this point is lunch. I don't want to stop focusing to make or eat it. I've even stated putting "lunch" on my to-do list and staying signed in to the LWSH while I cook, so it feels more like food is part of work.

This post is part of a year-long project for learning to install habits of thought. For more about the tortoise skills project itself, see the Tortoise Skills Page.

Summary

Habit: Growing the Roses Of Success
Duration: 7 Days
Success: 7/10
Trigger: The very beginning of a trapped, sinking sensation in my stomach and chest associated with having failed.
Action: ???Magic unconscious hypnosis repair???
Result: Upon encountering the beginning of a slight sinking sensation associated with a failure, I no longer get dragged into counterproductive emotions. Instead, I feel nonchalant interest in what went wrong, an impulse to weigh whether it's worth trying to repair completely, and a motivation to make any cheap repairs that are available immediately.

Strategy Updates

Here's what I've learned over the past week about habits and installing them, and what I plan to do about it.

1. The current version of the installation procedure works best for a narrower class of habits than I recognized at first.
   
   Next actions:
   1. Pin down more precisely what kinds of habits it's good for.
   2. Look for small tweaks to the procedure that might accommodate more kinds of habits.
   3. Consider investing in large changes or multiple procedures.
   
   
2. I need to dig into Rule 1. ("Aim: I will endeavor for every habit I train to be the one I most desperately need at that time.") I meant for it to be an often unattainable ideal to strive for, something to keep my from getting distracted and losing my purpose, and not so much a "rule" that I must adhere to perfectly. My intuitive feel for what I need most isn't turning out to be quite as strong as I expected, and I'm experiencing some analysis paralysis.
   
   Next actions:
   1. Make a list of possible criteria for choosing the next habit.
   2. Write it up as a blog post if it goes well.
   
   
3. Offline training should definitely be more streamlined. How best to use my offline training time will vary a lot by context and mood, but I found myself wishing I had a list of questions posted in front of me to guide me. (Terminology: "Offline training" comes from machine learning. Online learning updates mappings when each new data point comes in. It's good when data become available sequentially. Applied to humans, we call this "learning on the fly". Offline learning techniques are good when a large batch of data is available at once. Cramming for an exam is a human example. What I'm calling "offline training" in this context is whatever I decide to do when I sit down for a few minutes to look at all the relevant facts at once.)
   
   Next actions:
   1. Brainstorm a list of offline training questions
   2. Pick the best ones and make a list to post in the zendo
   3. Write a blog post about offline habit training (pending feedback from at least one more installation)
   
   
4. Offline meta sessions (to reflect on and strategize about the overall procedure) aren't built into the current installation procedure. In retrospect, it's obvious they should be.

Next actions:
1. Decide what the schedule should be for meta strategy sessions
2. Make a list of questions to guide meta strategy sessions

Log

12/31/2014

[This first entry is all prep work. It's probably more detailed than future reports on prep work will be.]

My best guess at the skill I most desperately need right now is resilience: the ability to recover rapidly, especially from failure; to bend without breaking.

1. Be able to generate concrete examples of successes and failures to apply the skill.
   
   An example of successful application: Every time another approach to teaching epistemic rationality failed, CFAR adjusted and tried something else, rather than giving up on teaching epistemic rationality.
   
   An example of failure to apply the skill: I got a C on my very first logic test in college. Rather than correct my mistakes and study for the next test, I was crushed and spent several days agonizing over whether to drop the class. Complete failure would have been dropping the class at that point (which I didn't and went on to excel in highly advanced logic courses), but perfect resilience would have prevented any waste of time or energy.

2. If a skill requires multiple habits, train them serially, and repeat step 1 for each individual habit.
   
   This skill seems to require several habits. It's difficult to pin them all down, but I have at least identified a few. I'll start with "growing the roses of success": feeling emotions in line with knowledge that my failure has been educational.
   
   For every big mistake you make be grateful!
   That mistake you'll never make again!
   Every shiny dream that fades and dies,
   Generates the steam for two more tries!
   So when it gets distressing it's a blessing!
   Onward and upward you must press!
   From the ashes of disaster grow the roses of success!
   
   An example of growing the roses of success is burning a batch of cookies and feeling happy to have learned that my new oven is hotter than my old oven. Failure to grow the roses of success in the same situation would be sulking about having burnt the cookies.

3. Clearly define at least one high-quality trigger for the proposed action before beginning to train that habit.
   
   When I imagine burning the cookies, the deciding moment that splits the success worlds from the failure worlds is the moment when I'm surprised to find smoke and blackened cookies after opening the oven door and I feel a trapped, sinking sensation in my stomach and chest. In the failure worlds, I let that feeling drag me into an inescapable pit of negative emotions. In the success worlds, I respond to it in a way that shifts my focus from the badness of my mistake to the goodness of information. (Figuring out exactly what intervention will cause that shift comes later.)
   
   Imagining other concrete examples produces the same results, so my first guess at the right trigger is "the experience of unpleasant surprise at my mistake accompanied by a trapped sinking sensation in my stomach and chest". Therefore, if I encounter that experience, then I will activate reflective attention to reveal further details and inconsistencies with my prediction.

That's it for the prep work!

1/2/2015

I'm not encountering enough instances of my trigger. It happened once yesterday, and I didn't catch it fast enough. That means it's time for...

4. Seek opportunities to practice.
   
   I will now study the experience of realizing I've made a mistake by playing 2048.
   
   Results: Oh man, awesome side effects.
   
   
   1. I'm using my knitting counter, and since that's already a conditioned reinforcer, I'm automatically coming to associate noticing I've made a mistake with positive feelings. I didn't even notice before how much I direct my attention away from my own mistakes. I wonder if I could break that habit even faster using a primary reinforcer.
   2. This is quickly training me to notice the difference between an error of judgement and a random "shit happens", since I only get to click the counter for errors of judgement.
   
   This is the best game of 2048 ever. I'm rewarded in the natural way by the game when I don't fuck up, and I'm rewarded by the habit training every time I notice I've fucked up. I'm literally laughing out loud at my fuckups. This is so much fun. I love rule 4.
   
   My count for today is 38 so far, so I'm clearly in the middle of...
   
   
5. Train triggers before actions.
   
   I actually updated my trigger partway though without being foveally aware of it. I think my first hypothesis for the trigger was wrong. The surprise at my mistake and the dread/sinking sensation are not simultaneous. In fact, the dread/sinking sensation isn't even my usual response to noticing I've made a mistake. My usual response actually seems to be to try to ignore the mistake. It's only when I fail to ignore it that I experience the dread.
   
   Trying to ignore a mistake feels like trying to avoid eye contact. I even seem to be more likely to make another mistake immediately afterward, because I act hastily. I think maybe I'm trying to distract myself from the first mistake, though it actually feels more like I'm trying to distract the world, like if I move fast enough the world won't notice I messed up and it won't count. Same as the five second rule when I dropped food on the floor as a kid.
   
   Updated trigger: The sensation of surprise directed at something I recognize as my mistake, independent of the sinking sensation or even the sensation of trying not to look at the mistake.

1/4/2015

I feel like I'm doing something wrong, but I'm a bit sleep deprived and I'm having a lot of trouble concentrating enough to work out what it is.

It might be that I'm practicing the wrong thing. My current trigger is "the sensation of surprise directed at something I recognize as my mistake", but I updated to that in an attempt to not ignore my mistakes, which wasn't the original goal. The original goal was to cut back on despair in response to mistakes and promote something like satisfaction and curiosity. It's only the very tiny mistakes that I'm able to ignore anyway, so although not ignoring tiny mistakes is an important skill (one I'm adding to my wishlist), I don't think it's part of resilience, and I don't think it's The Most Important Thing for me to learn right now.

The times when I've made and noticed mistakes on my own so far this week, I've not felt the despair-type feelings that I flagged as problematic before. Like when I accidentally left my knitting counter upstairs this morning. I just felt "oops" and maybe a tiny bit of frustration, then I ran upstairs to retrieve it. That's all there was to it. That kind of feeling doesn't have the potential to get in my way.

The only times in the past few days when I've felt the problematic thing I flagged have been while interacting with other people. And I don't think I clicked the knitting counter for any of those, because they weren't straightforwardly mistakes. In retrospect, some of them actually were things I perceived as evidence of mistakes, but I didn't notice that at the time: for example, when I made a Facebook update and people responded with apparently off-topic comments, indicating I hadn't made my point clearly.

I'm thinking the problem is closely related to inadequacy in the eyes of other people, not so much myself. It definitely feels like every time I've felt big anti-resilience emotions, it has been because other people have not responded the way I hoped for them to. It's a little confusing, because if I perceive a failure myself that I don't believe others perceive as a failure, I still feel the despair thing, but only if other people are somehow involved. If I write a blog post that includes a mistake people criticize, I feel it, and if I write a blog post that people like but don't interpret as I intended, I also feel the thing. I mostly don't feel the thing if I make a private mistake that nobody else finds out about.

Updated trigger: I think I'll go back to noticing the trapped, sinking sensation in my stomach and chest, and I'll seek opportunities to practice by reading critiques of things I've written.

1/6/2015

6. Test a variety of actions if required.
   
   This sometimes happens. It's a little inconvenient given that I wanted to use this first habit to demonstrate in quite a bit of detail how the habit installation process works. But for me, at least, it happens at least half the time.
   
   Sometimes, without my conscious direction, my brain skips the "test a variety of actions" part. I jump from "ok, I mostly have a handle on my default response to the trigger, and I can notice it reliably" to "have the preferred response to the trigger instead", with no purposeful intervention at all beyond simply learning to notice the trigger. In this case, it's happening even without me having become consciously aware of what exactly my preferred response to the trigger is.
   
   The new response isn't exactly like I predicted. What I imagined originally was more of a focused curiosity and maybe a triumphant feeling similar in intensity to the sinking sensation from before. Instead, I've replaced the trapped feeling and sinking sensation with a nonchalant interest in what went wrong, an impulse to weigh whether it's worth trying to repair completely, and a motivation to make any cheap repairs that are available immediately. In retrospect, that does seem like the best emotional response for producing the most desirable behavioral responses. I suppose I was imagining overpowering the negative reaction with a positive one. This seems better.

I still need to stick with it for a few days before starting on another habit to make sure I don't lose the ability to notice the trigger, but at the moment it looks like the problem has mostly been fixed, and the new habit mostly installed.

The main problem when I perform an unconscious intervention like this is that if in the future it fails to work, I won't know what levers to manipulate to get it working again. Since I don't know that that issue will actually arise and I can just take a few days to implement step six if it does, I declare this habit 80/20d. I'll move on to my next habit on Thursday (a week from the start date) if I don't encounter more problems.

1/8/2015

I'm not entirely satisfied with the installation of this habit because the intervention (whatever it is) hasn't been tested harshly enough for me to feel confident that the problem's mostly fixed. But I also have a feeling it's not quite the right kind of habit for this process. Instances of the trigger that are high enough intensity to thoroughly test my progress are quite context dependent, and aren't happening frequently enough for training on the scale of one week to a month. I suspect I either need habits with more frequent triggers, I need to be more opportunistic by picking habits with triggers that will be frequent in contexts I predict will occur in the near future, or I need to change the procedure to accommodate less frequent triggers, perhaps by training more than once habit at a time. Or perhaps I should have a tiered system, where at any given time I'm training one high-frequency habit, one mid-frequency habit, and one low-frequency habit. I'll think on it.

The meta stuff is really important, especially this early on, so I'm going to hold off on choosing a new habit for a few days while I work out how to respond to problems that have arisen so far.

2/9/2015

One month since this post, and things seem to be holding steady with Growing the Roses. I fairly rarely notice the trigger consciously (maybe once a week), but my experience of small failures has been awfully smooth sailing. (Performing the desired action without noticing the trigger consciously is part of the goal. Noticing is essential for training, but mastery of a habit means completely effortless, automatic performance.) My failures are notable for their lack of salience, so the change isn't obvious when I'm not reflecting on it, but my memory of the past month is not punctuated by failures, and that's definitely new. I still haven't encountered anything I consider a really big failure. I'll update again with a full report on my experience of it as soon as one happens.

Related Posts: Mindfulness, How To Train Noticing, Feeling Clearly, Tathatā: Why Be Here Now?, Simulating Confusion, What It's Like To Notice Things

What is a reflective record?

A reflective record is anything you write down while in reflective attention.

What does a reflective record look like?

Here's a typical example of one of my reflective records from a couple months ago.

The sound of cars on the road, and a fly flitting through a beam of sunlight. I’m sleepy and my head feels fuzzy. The laptop is uncomfortably warm on my legs, and I think I should move it. The room smells like empanadas from lunch. A moment of blankness, which gives way as I realize I’ve simply lost direction for a moment. I gently nudge it back to the flow of my stream of consciousness. I notice that I have a Facebook notification, wonder what it is, and now I’m deciding to close all my tabs but this one. A feeling of familiarity like an openness in my chest, and as I watch that, memories of having performed this exercise many times. Through my inner monologue, the words “What will my readers think of the chapter I'm working on?”, accompanied by a very dull and mild pang of anxiety. I take a deep breath, and I’m enjoying the sensation of the air rushing out of my nostrils as I exhale. The words “categories of experience”, and I imagine circling phrases with colored pencils. A feeling of sufficiency and completion, part of my experience of the belief that I should stop writing now.

And here's what happens if I make a reflective record right now.

Cars passing by on the road making a swooshing noise. I'm imagining the scene out the window, though I'm looking at my computer screen. I'm imagining the visuals of a sunset over the ocean framed by hills and buildings, though it's actually morning and the sky is cloudy and gray. A pang of hunger rising in my stomach, feeling sharp and insistent. Words in my head: "what should I eat?", and a little frustration. Stopping work to eat feels at once aversive and enticing. The thought of eating causes relief and happiness, but the thought of cooking causes gumbly dark denial and I want to ignore the thought. My socks are gray-blue and fuzzy, and they make me content and comfortable. A memory of the way my attention suddenly retreated from the thought of food to grasp the nearest non-food-related sensation. Sleepiness, a constant temptation for my attention to wander away and forget itself, and apparently I'm more willing to describe my experience in imprecise metaphor than I feel I remember having been in past reflective records. My mind wants to focus on the difference between reflective recording and free writing. The locking-in-place-resolution of a decision not to bother writing about free writing in this post, but to reconsider after I eat.

What is reflective recording good for?

I use reflective recording for three things.

1. Habit training. Suppose you're trying to learn a more productive psychological response to confusion than the one you usually have. If you want to respond with curiosity, you'll need an intervention that inputs the beginning of your default response and outputs curiosity. To figure out what that intervention should be, it helps to have a detailed model of the input. Human memory isn't designed to store most of the sorts of things that go on in moment-to-moment awareness, so if you don't capture the details right away, you'll probably forget something important. If gather several reflective records after the same trigger over time, you'll get a better idea of how widely your default responses to the trigger vary.
   
   The same goes for testing the output: To know quickly if the intervention reliably causes the desired mental state, you need to know what mental state it causes, and you need to keep track of the results over time.

2. Responsible introspection. Responsible introspection is a way to gain self-knowledge while bypassing the introspection illusion. It means paying attention to immediate experience first, and reasoning abstractly about that data later.
   
   We do not have direct access to the origins of our mental states, but we do have mental states, and the contents of those mental states aren't arbitrary. Our experiences provide data about our patterns of thought. To introspect responsibly, collect that data by activating reflective attention in the presence of whatever stimulus interests you (a thought about a new job offer, for instance), and then writing down what you experience. You can repeat that a few times to find out how your reactions to the thought vary over time.
   
   Once you have detailed first-person data that isn't contaminated by inference and belief about belief, you can add it to third-person observations about your past behaviors. From there, it's relatively safe to reason abstractly about problems that depend on predictions about how you'll think and feel.

3. Predicting experience. Most of immediate experience is forgotten. Most of it doesn't matter, isn't vivid, isn't unusual, and doesn't make a lasting impression. It takes an extra reflective effort of become aware that your mind's doing whatever it's doing. A lot of the truth of what it is to be a mind slips through the cracks, so our default models of immediate experience lack crucial information. For example, we tend to hold onto beliefs we form and dispense with memories of what observations led us to form those beliefs, and what emotions colored our perceptions as we integrated those observations.
   
   When you have a better model of immediate experience, you can make better predictions about how you'll think and feel on a moment-to-moment basis in the future. Practicing reflective attention regularly can't bring back information you've already lost, but it can reduce illusions about experience that result from biases of memory.
   
   Making a reflective record now and then is even better than reflective attention alone, since it lets you review data taken from many time slices all at once.

Reflective recording is inspired by free writing and (my problems with) Gendlin's focusing, but it's a practice I developed myself. To my knowledge, nobody else has tried it yet, so I'll be very interested to hear about how it works, or doesn't work, for you.

---

Here's a conversation in response to this post from Facebook. I'll incorporate what I learned from it into the post soon (probably), but for now, I'm putting it here because it might clear some things up.

Malcolm: I would expect the act of writing stuff down to be way too slow and I wouldn't be able to think things in time. Might try this with speaking aloud and recording it as audio (which is actually what I expected it would be, based on the name).

Jamie:I found that attempting this slowed me right down. I can't write, type or speak even close to the speed I notice thoughts. Converting impressions and awareness into words and then into movement instructions for recording them is almost uselessly slow for stream-of-consciousness stuff. I can sort of 'buffer' because I can sustain two mental streams at once, but even so it's the mental equivalent of trying to run in knee-deep water. By the time I've finished writing something I lost awareness of 90% of the other things I was experiencing at the same moment as whatever it was I was writing down, and almost have to pick the next thing to write at random.

On the plus side, it did make me aware of just how MUCH I notice and immediately throw away without acting on, including stuff I probably ought to record or remember.

Me: You're both probably trying to catch a whole lot more than I am. I wait for a particular kind of thought when I'm actually using this for specific things. When I'm not I pick sort of at random with a huge bias toward stuff it's easy to put into words.

Malcolm: Hmmm... oh! Okay, yeah, I think I have a better sense of the structure. I think the examples you give are kind of misleading about this, as they imply just the random version.

Jamie: Right, so it's not a logfile, it's either a listener or a random activity sample. That feels a lot less close to 'awesome superpower', but a great deal closer to 'physically possible for unaugmented humans'. Your examples felt pretty much stream-of-consciousness, so I had interpreted it as 'log everything that seems important about a given moment'.

Me: Yeah, I was erring on the side of not including enough because I'm trying to learn to only say precisely what is needed. But when I designed a series of exercises on reflective attention, most of the point was to get to "partial reflection", which means keeping your attention fixed on a single category of thought (like physical sensations, emotional sensations, reactions to another person).

But I expect different people to parse their experiences differently, and I found that even for myself sans communication with others, it helped to have identified the most natural system of categorization for my moment-to-moment experiences. The random-ish sampling was originally just for finding those categories. It turns out that it's also great for moving into partial reflective recording if you're having a hard time getting a particular category in focus at first. Also, beginning with partial reflective recording and moving out of it only when it feels right tends to make my free writing sessions a lot more productive a lot more quickly.

Here's my categorization of the first example in the post. (It was edited a little to make more sense in context.)

Alice wants to stop treating her beliefs as binary and start treating them probabilistically—that is, she wants to update herself incrementally. So she's hoping to work on the skill of raising her credence a little bit when she encounters weak evidence against her beliefs, instead of entirely disregarding anything that doesn't completely "change her mind". What should she do?

Obvious plan is obvious: If she encounters weak contrary evidence, then she should update slightly away from the hypothesis.

But obvious plan is not best plan. Why not?

Let's assume that Alice already knows exactly what she means by "update slightly away from the hypothesis" and knows exactly how to do it. (So the first problem is that in real life, she might not know either of those things.) The problem I want to focus on in this post is that "encounter weak contrary evidence" is a shitty trigger no matter how good the action you plan to take when the trigger happens.

Imagine one of those fake duck ponds you see at carnivals, the ones with the kiddie pool and the yellow rubber ducks. A current is pushing the floating ducks in circles around the edge of the pool. There are nine ducks with their bellies painted red, and one duck with its belly painted purple. To win the prize, you have to grab the purple-bellied duck when it floats by.

Now imagine the same duck pond, but instead of their bellies being painted, it's their backs. There are nine red-backed ducks and one purple-backed duck, and to win the prize, you have to grab the purple-backed duck when it floats by.

The second game's a lot easier, right? Why is that?

The mere fact that the purple duck is in front of you is an insufficient trigger. When you play the second game and win, you're not just grabbing the duck in front of you when it's purple. You're grabbing the duck in front of you when you see that it is purple. You notice a purple experience happening in your mind, and that's how you know to grab the duck. In the first game, you lose, because there's nothing to notice. Even though the ducks are in fact different, they all look the same from your vantage point.

Back to Alice.

The game she's playing is "update slightly when I encounter weak contrary evidence". The duck pond is the world, the current is time, and the ducks are events. Most of the ducks are red, and the purple ducks are "weak contrary evidence". "When I encounter weak contrary evidence" is a bad trigger in exactly the same way that "when the purple duck is in front of me" is a bad trigger. It doesn't pick out a subjective experience that distinguishes the attempted trigger from everything else. There's nothing to notice.

To make a good training plan, Alice needs an analogue to an experience of purpleness. She needs to know exactly what it feels like to encounter weak contrary evidence. Once she has that, then she has a reliable trigger.

So how can Alice find out what subjective experience is a function of weak contrary evidence? First of all, she's got to know what weak contrary evidence is. Not just what it feels like, but what it means. Let's assume she knows that already. So what's left is to identify the corresponding subjective experience.

Here's how I do it.

1. I guess. I remember or imagine a few specific instances of encountering weak contrary evidence (such as when I thought my friend wasn't attracted to me, but when I made eye contact with him across the room at a party he smiled widely). On the basis of those simulations, I make a prediction about what it will feel like, in terms of immediate subjective experience, to encounter weak contrary evidence in the future. The prediction is a tentative trigger. For me, this would be "I feel a sort of matching up with one of my beliefs, there's a bit of dissonance, a tiny bit of fear, and maybe a small impulse to direct my attention away from these sensations and away from thoughts about the observation causing all of this".
2. I test my guess. I keep a search going on in the background for anything in the neighborhood of the experience I predicted. Odds are good I'll miss several instances of weak contrary evidence, but as soon as I realize I've encountered one, I go into reflective attention so I'm aware of as many details of my immediate subjective experience as possible. I pay attention to what's going on in my mind right now, and also what's still looping in my very short-term memory of a few moments before I noticed. Then I compare those results to my prediction, noting anything I got wrong, and I feed that information into a new prediction for next time. (I might have gotten something wrong that caused the trigger to go off at the wrong time, which probably means I need to narrow my prediction.) The new prediction is the new trigger.
3. I repeat the test until my trigger seems to be accurate and precise. Now I've got a good trigger to match a good action.

If I were Alice, I'd take one more step toward noticing every instance of weak contrary evidence. A precise and accurate trigger is necessary, but it's not always sufficient. This kind of skill takes practice.

I have a knitting counter, which I bought for $7.13 on Amazon. Knitting counters are very simple: You press a button, and it advances the count by one. When I'm training myself to notice a trigger, I carry the knitting counter in my pocket. Every time I notice the trigger, I push the button. I reset the counter to zero at the end of the day, and the next day I try to beat my highest score.

(There are plenty of substitutes for the knitting counter, of course, such as keeping track in your head. But it does make a highly satisfying cliking sound.)

I keep doing this until my score levels out. Then, I swap out the action of pressing the button for whatever other action I think is useful. In this case, it would be "update slightly away from the hypothesis".

Usually, the leveling out process runs into the action-swapping process, so for a while I'm responding with the action while I'm still getting better at noticing the trigger. But if the action is any more complicated than pressing a button, I hold off on taking it and train noticing specifically until I'm feeling pretty comfortable with the noticing itself.

So in short, here's how to train noticing: Identify a subjective experience you want to notice, predict what the experience will be like, test your prediction, repeat 'til you've got it right, and gamify your practice.

And somewhere in the back of his mind was a small, small note of confusion, a sense of something wrong about that story; and it should have been a part of Harry's art to notice that tiny note, but he was distracted. For it is a sad rule that whenever you are most in need of your art as a rationalist, that is when you are most likely to forget it. —HPMOR, Ch. 3

A rationalist’s art is most distant when it is most needed. Why is that?

When I am very angry with my romantic partner, what I feel is anger. I don’t feel the futility of throwing a tantrum, or the availability of other options like honest communication, or freewriting, or taking a deep breath. My attention is so narrowly focused on the object of my anger that I’m likely not even aware that I’m angry, let alone that my anger might be blinding me to my art.

When her skills are most needed, a rationalist is lost in an unskillful state of mind. She doesn’t recognize that it’s happening, and she doesn’t remember that she has prepared for it by learning and practicing appropriate techniques.

The following exercise trains a skill I call reflective attention, and some call mindfulness. For me, it serves as an anchor in a stormy mind, or as a compass pointing always toward a mental state where my art is close at hand.

Noticing that I am lost in an unskillful state of mind is a separate skill. But when I do happen to notice—when I feel that small, small note of confusion—reflective attention helps me find my way back. Instead of churning out even more pointless things to yell at my partner, it allows me to say, “I am angry. I feel an impulse to yell. I notice my mind returning over and over to the memory that makes me more angry. I’m finding it hard to concentrate. I am distracted. I have a vague impression that I have prepared for this.” And awareness of that final thought allows me to ask, “What have I trained myself to do when I feel this way?”

The goal of the following exercise is to practice entering reflective attention.

It begins with an instruction to think of nothing, because when you monitor yourself to make sure you’re not having any thoughts, your attention ends up directed toward the beginnings of thoughts. Since the contents of consciousness are always changing, maintaining focus on the beginnings of thoughts prevents you from engaging for an extended period with any particular thought. It prevents you from getting “lost in thought”, or keeping attention focused on a thought without awareness of doing so. The point is not actually to be successful at thinking nothing, but to notice what happens when you try.

Keeping your focus on the constant changes in your stream of consciousness brings attention to your experience of awareness itself. Awareness of awareness is the anchor for attention. It lets you keep your bearings when you’d otherwise be carried away by a current of thought or emotion.

Once you’re so familiar with that feeling of mindfulness that creating it is a primitive action, you can forget the introductory part, and jump straight to reflective attention whenever it occurs to you to do so.

---

This will probably take around five minutes, but you can do it for much longer if you want to.

Notice what your mind is doing right now. One thing it’s doing is experiencing sensations of black and white as you read. What else are you experiencing? Are there words in your inner monologue? Are there emotions of any kind?

Spend about thirty seconds trying not to think anything. When thirty seconds is up, stop trying not to think, and read on.

What’s happening in your mind is constantly changing. Even when you were trying not to think, you probably noticed many times when the stillness would shift and some new thought would begin to emerge in conscious awareness.

Turn your attention to those changes. When a new thought emerges in consciousness, see if you can notice the exact moment when it happens, becoming aware of what it feels like for that particular change to take place.

If it helps at first, you can narrate your stream of consciousness in words: “Now I’m seeing the blue of the wall, now I’m hearing the sound of a car, now I’m feeling cold, now I’m curious what time it is…” You’ll probably find that you can’t narrate anywhere near quickly enough, in part because thoughts can happen in parallel, while speech is serial. Once narrating starts to become frustrating for that reason, stop slowing yourself down with words, and just silently observe your thoughts as they occur.

If you’re finding this overwhelming because there are too many thoughts, narrow your focus down to just your breathing, and try to precisely identify the experience of an exhale ending and an inhale beginning, of an inhale ending and an exhale beginning. Keep doing that until you feel comfortable with it, and then slowly expand your attention a little at a time: to other experiences associated with breathing, to non-breath-related bodily sensations, to non-tactile sensations from your environment, and finally to internal mental sensations like emotions.

If you notice an impulse to focus your attention on a particular thought, following it and engaging with it—perhaps you notice you feel hungry, and in response you begin to focus your attention on planning lunch—instead of letting that impulse take over your attention, recognize it as yet another change in the activity of your mind. If you’re narrating, say, “now I’m feeling an impulse to plan my lunch”, and keep your focus broad enough to catch the next thought when it arises. If you realize that you’ve already become lost in a particular thought, notice that realization itself as a new thought, and return to observing your stream of consciousness by noticing the next new thought that happens as well.

You might need to practice this many times before you get the hang of it. I suggest trying it for ten minutes to half an hour a day until you do.

Once you feel like you can recognize the sensation of reflective attention and enter that state of mind reliably given time, begin to train for speed. Instead of setting a timer for fifteen minutes or however long you want to practice, set it to go off every minute for the first half of your practice, spending one minute in reflective attention, and one minute out. (Don’t do this for all of your practice. You still need to practice maintenance.) When you can consistently arrive in reflective attention by the end of the minute, cut the intervals down to 45 seconds, then thirty, fifteen, and five.

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In real life, the suspicion that you may be lost in an unskillful state of mind will be quiet and fleeting. “Quiet” means you’ll need to learn to snap your attention to the slightest hint of that feeling. For that, you’ll need to train “noticing”. “Fleeting” means you’ll need to be able to respond in less than five seconds. You’ll need to begin the process in less than one second, even if it takes a little longer to fully arrive in reflective attention. For that, training for speed is crucial.

Every stripper knows to name a higher price than he expects to get when selling a lap dance. He'll start out by telling you it'll cost $75, and you'll say that's too much. Then you'll counter with $40, and he'll say, "How about $50, and I show you a new trick I learned yesterday." If I ask you later why you agreed to $50, then unless you already know about anchoring effects (or perhaps even if you do), you'll say the guy was hot and you thought $50 was a fair price.

But if I asked you the moment you walked into the club, "What's the highest price you'd consider fair for a lap dance with the guy on stage right now?" you'd say, "$25" (or something lower than $50, anyway). You wouldn't be lying to me. It would feel true to you.

Anchoring is just one among the many guises of the introspection illusion.

People tend to think they have direct access to the origins of their mental states. They think they're infallible when it comes to certain kinds of self-knowledge, like why they chose to be a teacher, whether they like broccoli, or why they agreed to pay $50 for a lap dance. But they're wrong.

This is a big deal.

Suppose you want to be more productive by making your work periods more enjoyable, so you've decided to start playing your favorite kind of music (French house) as you work. Here are some judgements that might have influenced that plan:

• your favorite kind of music is French house
• you're more productive when you're happy
• you don't find music distracting

Maybe all of these things are true, and maybe not. If they're not, your plan isn't going to work so well. Will you notice when it fails, or will you go on believing all of these things whatever happens, as long as they keep feeling true? The introspection illusion means that how true they feel to you is not an excellent indicator of how true they actually are, even though they're mostly about your own thoughts and beliefs. Empirical observations about productivity under various circumstances must be part of the story.

But not all kinds of introspection are equally subject to this problem.

The introspection illusion happens when we try to access the processes underlying our conscious mental states. Processes underlying our conscious mental states are not themselves part of our conscious mental states. So this is the illusion of feeling as though we are conscious of unconscious processes.

But we really are conscious of some things. You're conscious of the temperature of the room, now that I've brought your attention to it. You're conscious of the color of your shirt. You're conscious of the emotional sensations that occur upon reading the phrase "your grandfather's voice".

The surface level introspection you employed to become aware of each of those mental contents is far more reliable than the deep soul-searching people often associate with the word "introspection". And you can get a lot of mileage out of that if you know how to use it. This is what all the "mindfulness" and "being in the moment" stuff is really about.

If just asking yourself the question "How do I feel about my boyfriend's new girlfriend?" and going with the first judgement that occurs to you won't do the trick for predicting the emotions that will influence your interactions with her, what will work?

There's a technique I use often for making more accurate predictions about my future mental states. I call it "Feeling Clearly". It's not a method for revealing the true feelings hidden at the core of your being. It's just careful observation of what does in fact happen to your mind when it encounters whatever you're wondering about. If you're right about that, what you really truly feel deep down (if there is such a thing) isn't so important, is it? Predicting and influencing the contents of your consciousness is all that matters.

This is applied experimental phenomenology. It lacks many virtues of a randomized, double-blind, controlled, peer-reviewed study. But your feedback loops can be way fast.

How fast?

Quick, make a prediction about how much you will enjoy imagining smelling a rose. Ok, now imagine smelling a rose. How much did you enjoy it? Did you overestimate, or underestimate? Taking that into account, make another prediction about how much you'll enjoy imagining smelling a rose. Ok, now imagine smelling a rose again. Were you closer this time?

That fast.

Here's how it works.

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Choose a simple idea or topic that makes you a little uncomfortable. Nothing really important or painful, just something small that's been worrying you, or that feels unresolved. It might be something a friend said to you yesterday. It might be an upcoming responsibility, or a recent event that didn't go as well as you'd hoped. Whatever it is, be specific, and then set it aside for later.

Notice what your mind is doing right now. One thing it’s doing is experiencing sensations of black and white as you read. What else are you experiencing? Are there words in your inner monologue? Are there emotions of any kind?

What’s happening in your mind is constantly changing. Turn your attention to the changes. When a new thought emerges in consciousness, see if you can notice the exact moment when it happens, becoming aware of what it feels like for that particular change to take place.

If it helps at first, you can narrate your stream of consciousness in words: “Now I’m seeing the blue of the wall, now I’m hearing the sound of a car, now I’m feeling cold, now I’m curious what time it is…” You’ll probably find that you can’t narrate anywhere near quickly enough. Once narrating starts to become frustrating for that reason, stop slowing yourself down with words, and just silently observe your thoughts as they occur.

If you’re finding this overwhelming because there are too many thoughts, narrow your focus down to just your breathing, and try to precisely identify the experience of an exhale ending and an inhale beginning, of an inhale ending and an exhale beginning. Keep doing that until you feel comfortable with it, and then slowly expand your attention a little at a time: to other experiences associated with breathing, to non-breath-related bodily sensations, to non-tactile sensations from your environment, and finally to internal mental sensations like emotions.

If you notice an impulse to engage with a particular thought—perhaps you notice you feel hungry, and in response you begin to focus your attention on planning lunch—instead of letting that impulse take over your attention, recognize it as yet another change in the activity of your mind. If you’re narrating, say “now I’m feeling an impulse to plan my lunch”, and keep your focus broad enough to catch the next thought when it arises.

Do that for about five minutes, or until you’re ready to move on.

When you’re ready, think the thought you chose at the beginning. Drop it into your stream of consciousness. Then immediately go right back to noticing thoughts, emotions, and sensations as they arise.

You’ll probably notice some activity occurring in response to the thought you just dropped in. Observe those responses, one after another, not being drawn into any one of them but remaining aware of each.

Do this for as long as needed. Think the thought again whenever you feel the responses to it have died down.

When you’re done, write down each of the reactions you recall, before they fade from memory.

As a variation, you can write down the reactions in the middle of the exercise, as they’re happening. I don’t suggest starting off with this variation, because it introduces a focus on words that might be disruptive. Find out what it’s like without writing the first time you try it.

Try several sessions of this spread out over the course of a day, or over a few days, and keep notes each time.

---

So what does this get you? It gets you reliable data on what happens when you encounter whatever thought you're interested in. It circumvents the introspection illusion to help you make more accurate predictions about your mental states, and therefore about whatever behaviors are influenced by them.

Now, that's not going to perfectly map onto real-world situations.

For one thing, it takes practice to get really rich, precise data; to distinguish "fear" from "a cold tightness in my chest I associate with anxiety, plus a feeling of directedness at an image of being abandoned".

Secondly, a thought about something isn't the thing itself. Your simulation of what it will be like to meet Tiffany will have some correlation to what it will actually be like to meet Tiffany, but it won't be perfect.

You can get better at that too, though. You can calibrate.

Get really comfortable with reflectivity, the central skill of this exercise. Then, when you actually meet Tiffany in real life, activate that reflective mode, and take note of how exactly your predictions fail. Form hypotheses about why, and feed those back into your next round of simulation.

It was a sunny day, and Sunjai was taking a stroll down the road through the forest. When he got to a familiar bend, he caught something shiny out of the corner of his eye. As he turned to look over, another elephant suddenly appeared. Where had he come from? It's hard for an elephant to sneak up on another elephant, but Sunjai was completely taken by surprise.

Warily, he turned toward the newcomer, fanning his broad ears and letting a low rumble rise from his throat in greeting. The other man was tall, like Sunjai, and his tusks were similarly long and almost straight. He looked so much like the elephants in Sunjai's family that he thought they must be related, but was sure they'd never met before. Thought he was quite handsome overall, he had a strange marking on his forehead, a bright red line a few inches long and no wider than a human finger. It was the wrong hue to be a natural marking, and Sunjai wondered if he'd been cut.

The newcomer wasn't saying a word. His ears were still fanned out in greeting, and the nervous sweeping of his trunk suggested he felt the same growing awkwardness as Sunjai. Sunjai tried another "hello". Still no response.

Sunjai was really getting worried. This was not at all the standard protocol in any family he'd encountered before. He began to back up and bow his head submissively, in case he'd somehow offended this person--but as he did, the newcomer did the exact same!

Sunjai did not understand this game. He turned to leave before he could make any more mistakes. But after just a couple of steps, the newcomer had disappeared, just as suddenly and silently as he'd arrived to begin with. In his place was an oddly bright and shimmering patch of forest.

Curiosity got the best of him. Sunjai turned back, seeking the hidden path the man must have found, approaching from the side this time, nearer the bright patch--and there he was again, only inches away this time!

What?! Sunjai reared back and almost fell over, he was so startled. When he righted himself, the newcomer was also stumbling, looking equally startled. "How did you do that?" Sunjai asked. They stood still, just looking at each other, for several long moments, while Sunjai pondered the mystery of the surprise elephant.

I don't know how he turns invisible like that. But why doesn't he answer me? Perhaps that is blood on his forehead, thought Sunjai, and his injury has somehow interfered with his ability to speak. I've been so worried about me during this encounter, worried I might get hurt, that I haven't spared any empathy at all for this stranger who may be hurt and confused.

"Do you need help?" he asked, turning his head in questioning. The stranger simply turned his head at the same time, offering no reply. "I'm going to take a look at that wound on your forehead." Sunjai lifted his trunk, reaching up toward the apparent wound. But the stranger lifted up his own trunk at the same time, blocking the advance.

"No, I promise I won't hurt you. Just hold still." He reached out a little faster this time, and the the two elephants bumped trunks. Sunjai pulled back, startled again, for that hadn't felt like elephant flesh. It had been cold and hard, almost like ice. He reached out again, touched, thinking that perhaps he'd imagined it. No, not like ice. But not like flesh either. It was exactly like the glass through which humans observed back at the enclosure.

Sunjai reached over again, trying to touch the man's shoulder, to see if there was something wrong with his trunk, or if all of his skin was like glass. But every single move he made was perfectly blocked, exactly matched by the movements of the other man.

Sunjai put his trunk down. He moved it left, holding it out in a very unnatural, uncomfortable position. Maybe the behavioral similarities were a coincidence up 'til now, but nobody would just happen to reach their trunk stiffly out to the side and just hold it there.

The stranger followed suit. He tried the same thing to the right, and was matched again. He moved as if to reach his trunk up, but suddenly redirected at the last minute, reaching again out to the right. And the man was not tricked. He followed Sunjai exactly, impossibly quickly, as though he were behind Sunjai's eyes, watching him make decisions before he had time to act.

This can't be happening, Sunjai thought. Something is very wrong. And whatever it is is coming from the shimmering patch of forest.

Sunjai leaped sideways, then forward, approaching the bright patch from a new angle, around the other elephant, giving him no time to run away or hide--

And the stranger was gone. Just, vanished. Again.

Sunjai backed up very slowly, tentatively, peering around the front again, reaching his trunk toward the light patch--and another trunk emerged from nowhere, creeping forward at the same rate and angle as his.

I'm losing my mind, thought Sunjai.

Sunjai inched sideways, watching as another elephant emerged bit by bit from nowhere.

Then he retreated again, moving his whole body away from the light patch. He stepped around back, placing himself exactly where the other elephant must have been moments before.

And it wasn't light at all. The light patch was actually a dark patch, because there was a huge black rectangle blocking out the sunlight.

He reached out to touch it, and found that it was cold and hard, just like glass. Just like the touch of the stranger. Sunjai reached his trunk around the side, feeling for the front of the rectangle as he stood at the back of it. Again, he felt glass.

Leaving his trunk on the front of the glass rectangle, Sunjai began to slowly step back around to the front of the "light patch", maintaining contact the whole time. And he could see, as he passed around the side, that the rectangle was very thin and flat, almost nothing to it.

He stopped, positioning his head so that he could see the black glass if he moved a hair to the left, the light patch and the disembodied trunk if he moved a hair to the right. He waved his trunk around, knowing it would cause the other trunk to move just the same. If there really was a trunk behind the glass, he'd be able to see it from here.

Nothing. There was no trunk behind the glass. Somehow, the disembodied trunk was on the front of the glass itself.

Sunjai's head was spinning. He was frightened and confused, and his panic was starting to overcome his curiosity. There was another elephant trapped in the surface the glass, and he had direct access to Sunjai's own intentions.

Sunjai fled. Putting the glass rectangle far behind him, he ran and ran, panting in a one-man stampede all the way back to his tribe.

"Sunjai!" his mother exclaimed, "Are you all right? Did you get hurt? There's something on your forehead!"

"On my... there's something... there's..." Slowly, shakily, Sunjai reached up to touch his own face. "There's something on my forehead." he whispered.

"Yes," his mother responded.

"On MY forehead!" he shouted.

"Yes, and it's bright red, it looks like--"

"BLOOD!" Sunjay almost screamed, and turned back the way he had come. "Mother, everyone, follow me. Quickly. You have got to see this!"

You're reading an article that claims bad news for your current dietary habits. Beets, which are your favorite food, are supposedly evil. According to the article, beets have been shown to cause heart disease, cancer, and Ebola. Yes, all at once.

Now, we can both predict what will happen to your attention by default.

It will shun any sensations that might indicate rationalization should they begin to arise in the periphery of your attention. It will initiate a sharply focused, moderately directed search for flaws in the study. And it will rapidly withdraw from all sensations indicating evidence in favor of the Evil Beets hypothesis.

There are a many many cognitive processes that contribute to such complicated mental events as "rationalization", and most of those processes are subconscious. What I want to draw your attention to is very simply attention: The allocation of limited processing resources at the level of conscious awareness.

You might not know how or why the rationalization process is happening, or even what it is really. But when you happen to become aware of some sensation that indicates it's going on, that's an opportunity to re-allocate resources, thereby exerting some control at the interface of conscious and unconscious processing.

---

There are a few things about attention that seem really important to me.

First is direction of attention. I talked about that in the last post, and suggested a quick (<5 minute) exercise to set off the associated sensation.

Second is focus of attention. Direction is where you point the spotlight. Focus is the radius of the beam.

Third is searching. Searching is a sweep of the darkness.

Searching is what happens with your attention if you're prepared to become aware of something. It happens in a sharply focused, highly directed way when you can't find your keys. It happens in a more softly focused, highly directed way when you search for something to write with. And it happens in a softly focused, relatively undirected way when you "keep an eye out" for someone with a hair cut you might like to try in the future.

---

So why does this matter? I've been illustrating with vision, but these spotlight-like properties characterize attention generally, as far as I can tell.

Go back to the Evil Beets article. By default, your attention's going to do some dangerous things that might make an enemy of the truth—resulting in death by heart disease, cancer, and Ebola.

But suppose you've trained hard and have excellent control over your attention. Then since you can predict it will do these things by default, you can counter. You can direct it toward sensations of rationalization. You can soften the search for flaws. And you can assign equal focus to sensations indicating evidence in favor of the Evil Beets hypothesis.

You'll probably need to do more than that to save yourself. But you could—and should—start by gaining control over your attention. Becoming consciously aware of a problem is usually the first step toward solving it.

---

Focusing Attention

Here's a quick exercise (<5mins) that sets off the sensation of focusing. Focus can be hard to distinguish from direction. It takes practice to gain precise control of either.

1. Rest your gaze on the top left corner of your monitor. Pick a tiny little spot. Focus on that point as narrowly as you can, picking out the tiniest pinprick of your visual field and letting all of your attention shine laser-like directly onto it.
2. Then, without moving your eyes, let your attention soften to include about an inch of space around that spot. Slowly let it soften to include more and more of your visual field.
3. How much can you soften your focus without changing anything about your vision? Once you're aware of as much space around spot as you can manage—perhaps your whole visual field—hop back and forth between laser focus and a one-foot radius of attention. Take note of the sensation of rapidly changing focus.

What is it like to have peripheral vision?

None of us is born knowing the difference between a situation and our experience of a situation.

There's so much Buddhism-inspired hype in contemporary self-help about "being in the moment". I don't know how much of it is completely missing the point.

But there is a point, and it's a good point.

The good point is not "you should spend all or even most of your time attending to immediate sensory experiences, rather than remembering the past, imagining the future, or entertaining abstract thoughts." How dare you pass by a flower without stopping to smell it! Unfortunately, that's the easiest thing to take away from anything that talks about "mindfulness" or "being here now".

When attempting to state the useful insight of "be here now", I find myself tempted to say things like, "Immediate experience is all we have." I don't say it, because I expect it to sound like nonsense to anyone who doesn't already know what I mean by it. I'll try it a slightly different way.

Problem solving tends to benefit from an accurate model of the situation, the available tools, and the problem solver. No matter what you do, every action will be directed by a mind that exists within its own bubble of immediate experience. We actually don't have a very good model of immediate experience by default, despite spending every moment of our lives in it.

When you imagine a future version of yourself, your attention is not on that with which you're immediately acquainted. It's on an attempt to model the future, and attempts to model the future call on memories of the past. Memories of the past are not faithful models of immediate experiences.

Most of immediate experience is forgotten. Most of it doesn't matter, isn't vivid, isn't unusual, doesn't make a lasting impression. It takes an extra reflective effort of become aware that your mind's doing whatever it's doing. A lot of the truth of what it is to be a mind slips through the cracks. So our default models of immediate experience lack crucial information.

Additionally, they equivocate between objects and representations of objects.

From a distance, you don't have separate memories of hearing your partner's voice become strained, seeing their facial muscles tighten, interpreting their words as insults and accusations, feeling a shadow of anger and believing it is the emotion they feel. You don't have a memory of sense impressions and interpretations, of forming hypotheses and weighing evidence. Not unless you've trained that specifically. You just have a memory of your partner being angry.

If you use that memory to plan for the future, at some point you're going to run headlong into the impossibility of experiencing your partner's anger directly. Where does your partner's actual anger exist? In your partner--and thus outside of your experience. That event just isn't available to you.

Why not?

Because immediate experience is all we have.

There, I said it.

It is the capacity to recognize all the features of immediate experience, without intrusion by mnemonic distortion and object-representation equivocation, that is cultivated by a practice of "living in the present moment".

It doesn't always work. Maybe it almost never works. I'd bet, though, that it works sometimes, and that almost nothing else ever does.

Here is a thing that I'm pretty sure is inappropriate for the book, but that I want to post somewhere anyway. I'm very curious to know your reactions. It's an exercise for creating enough distance between yourself and your experiences or beliefs that you can evaluate them more fairly, and maybe change your mind about them more easily. I expect it to take five to ten minutes.

There is now an open Facebook group for people interested in the applied phenomenology book I'm working on. I will use it to post exercises to get feedback, ask questions, answer questions, and keep people updated on my progress. It currently has a chapter by chapter overview of the current plan, and access to the first round of exercises. Please join if you want to play!

Most people have an internal monologue. Not just when they're reading, but much of the rest of the time too. There's a little voice sort of narrating their day to day activities all the time, or commenting on memories or imagined scenarios when they're distracted. "Ugh, I forgot to take out the garbage this morning." "Oh, that's a nice skirt!" "When is that report due again?"

Many of your thoughts--and I use that term loosely, referring to just about anything going on in your head that you can potentially be aware of--are therefore verbal.

I expect that there is an enormous bias, when we talk about our thoughts, to report the verbal ones, the ones that express themselves through our inner monologue. At the very least, we only tell people about our thoughts after they've passed through a translator that renders them verbal (unless we're using non-verbal art). But those cannot possibly be the only thoughts we have. We are too complex for that.

There is an exercise many people try when first dabbling in contemplative spiritual traditions that goes like this (and I do mean for you to try the exercise yourself):

Take out a watch or some other way of keeping time, and something to write with. Sit comfortably but upright, take a deep breath, and relax. When you're done reading this paragraph, set the timer for one minute. Then, sit silently, and clear your mind of all thoughts. Just stay that way, thinking nothing at all, for a whole minute.

Now take a few moments to write at least a sentence about your experience of the past minute. Did anything unexpected happen? How easy or difficult was it? If you noticed thoughts happening, what were they? (Feel free to post whatever you write in the comments.)

I find this exercise interesting for several reasons. First, it's very difficult for most people. Within seconds of starting the timer, they think to themselves, "Ok, no more thinking. Damn it, that was a thought!" Experts often call this "monkey mind".

Second, people very inexperienced with this sort of activity think their mind suddenly explodes in thought as soon as they sit down to practice, while somewhat more experienced practitioners come to realize that their mind is thinking all the time, and such exercises merely bring attention to that fact.

A few people really do get through the whole minute without activating their inner monologue, but most of them report making a continuous effort to suppress words that try to come up.

(And then there are some people who have no idea what you mean by "inner monologue" even after you describe it to them. I don't actually know how many, the state of science on this is bad, and I could talk about that for an entire post but this post is not about that. Mindspace is deep and wide. Moving on.)

But the most enlightening thing I've learned, both from personal experience and from talking to others who've tried this sort of thing, is that people implicitly believe that if they're not using words to talk to themselves in their heads, then they're not thinking--"no voice" equals "still, empty, featureless mind". The thoughts they struggle against the entire time in this exercise are the verbal ones, so much so that they aren't even aware of any other mental activity. And then when they finally manage a whole minute without narrating their experience, they think they've succeeded. I felt the same way when I first started.

Monastics, and others who sit in silence for hours every day for years, find that the inner monologue eventually becomes much quieter and often silent during those periods of sitting, whether they're quieting it on purpose or not. They also find--and this is perhaps the only really strong justification I know of for putting in the time requiured--that there are an awful lot of other things going on in their heads besides words. When the words stop drowning out all out all the other mental activity, it's possible become aware of those many silent thoughts. From there, one can learn to exert some control over the other mental activities, just like you can probably exert some control over your inner monologue now.

For example, you can re-read this sentence and think "white" when you read "blue". You can choose to generate a verbal thought about the texture of the floor below you. You can speed up the voice, slow it down, change its pitch, change its volume. With practice, you can even render it mute.

Most of what happens in your head is not words. Most of what determines your behavior has very little to do with the voice that narrates your actions (though the voice is also a powerful instrument once you know how to use it). You are far more prone to influence by silent mental flinches, urges, aversions, attitudes, emotions, shifts of attention and focus.

You can gain some control over most of these things. But you have to become aware of them first. You have to become intimately acquainted with aspects of experience you usually ignore before it will begin to have implications for your behavior in real life. Just like you can't quiet a verbal thought you didn't know you heard, you can't respond strategically to an aversion you didn't know you felt, or to a belief you didn't know you held.

The goal of the exercises I'm developing over the next few months is to help rationalists, and others who value clear thinking and better decision processes, gain awareness and control over the workings of their minds--without spending ten years motionless on a mountain top. Specifically, I hope to provide access to enough awareness and control that my readers can put whatever they know or learn of epistemic rationality to much better use.

I doubt I'll post literally everything I'm working on to this blog, but I'll want to share my thoughts as I work through them, and I'll want to have readers test run a lot of the exercises. Stay tuned!

In a recent blog post, Miri talked about why secular ritual is important to her, and about her experience of the 2013 Secular Solstice in New York. Much of what she said resonated strongly with me. In particular,

What I continue to yearn for despite all these years of atheism is that togetherness, the feeling of being part of a larger whole, of participating in ceremonies that have existed virtually unchanged for centuries, of feeling that I could go to services on Friday night in San Francisco or London or Tokyo or Cape Town and be welcomed in virtually the same way, with the same greetings and food and songs. They will say Shabbat shalom and there will be challah and red wine, in America and in Great Britain and in Japan and in South Africa.

and also,

... The Secular Solstice, in a weird and possibly unintentional way, validated how much I hate winter and how much of a “big deal” it is for me to get through it without some of my favorite distractions and coping mechanisms. Unlike the other winter holidays, the Solstice doesn’t frame winter as a happy cheery beautiful time with family, snowball fights, kissing under the mistletoe, Santa Claus, and Jesus. It frames it as a challenge, but one that we nevertheless get through every year.

I didn't make it to the New York Solstice last year, but I was at the one in San Francisco, and it was similarly powerful for me. The ritual may have been important to me for slightly different reasons, so I wanted to share my perspective as well.

As I've talked a little about before, I have seasonal affective disorder. Despite much recent improvement, it's severe enough that I'm living in Chile for the next four months to avoid the worst of the American winter. This has led to me having some pretty strong feelings about winter holidays, and Advent/Christmas in particular since I was raised Catholic.

Advent's more of a season than a holiday, but it shares with the Solstice the property of not framing winter as a "happy cheery beautiful time with family, snowball fights, kissing under the mistletoe, Santa Claus, and Jesus". It's supposed to symbolize the time at the end of the Old Testament after both Judea and Israel had fallen, but the Messiah had not yet come to deliver Yahweh's people from exile. Originally it was about the time after Jesus died and before his second coming, which is why Advent once included mandatory fasting and other forms of penitence--but then it turned out that he wasn't actually coming back any time soon, so people reinterpreted.

Either way, it's all about preparing to be saved.

Oh, come, oh, come, Emmanuel
And ransom captive Israel
That mourns in lonely exile here
Until the Son of God appear
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to you, O Israel!

The Catholics imagine that the Jews were actually right at that particular point in their history, and God really was about to come down from the heavens and save them from their misery. As such, the customs surrounding Advent are filled with longing, hope, and the feeling that if we can just hang on a little longer everything will be ok.

Which is exactly what it feels like to have SAD, at least before you learn resignation. And of course, contemporary Western Catholicism ties all of this very closely with Winter.

The Advent season has a lot of rituals I find quite lovely. The Advent wreath, for example (which was actually appropriated from the Lutherans, I just discovered, though the tradition of a wreath decorated with candles is much older than Christianity). Setting up a nativity scene with an empty manger. The whole of Christmas Eve Mass is just spectacular. It starts with a darkened church. Then, slowly, candles are lit and people begin to sing quietly. The lights aren't turned all the way up until Midnight, at which point (in my parish anyway) there begins a joyous Mass that is sung the entire way through.

From my perspective, though, Catholic Advent and Christmas seem terribly broken. There's so much beauty and so much potential there, but the moral of the story is all wrong. What do you do when the nights are long and the wind is cold and you have no place to call home? You huddle together and wait meekly for a Messiah to come and save you.

No. Just, no.

To me, the Secular Solstice is sort of what I wish Advent and Christmas could be. The aesthetics, and even the narrative, are very similar. But it builds toward something else: a resolution to save ourselves, each other, and everyone who will come after us. And to do more than that, to keep making our world better and better until the darkness has been permanently banished.

There is acknowledgement of hardship and the enormity of our challenge from within a cold universe that doesn't care about us in the slightest. That part is taken very seriously, and is tied to the metaphors of winter and night. And then, as a community, we accept that challenge with a vow, not to submit to our fate until a savior is sent from heaven to rescue us, but a vow to take the future into our own hands, to ensure by our own power that it's something beautiful and bright.

Tomorrow can be brighter than today
Although the night is cold
The stars may seem so very far away
But courage, hope, and reason burn
In every mind, each lesson learned
Shining light to guide to our way
Make tomorrow brighter than today

Winter is still hard for me, but last winter was the best one I've had since early childhood. At the San Francisco Solstice celebration, it was clear to me why. Not only am I part of tight-knit community again--not quite a congregation, but close--but I'm surrounded by people brimming with determination to improve themselves and the world around them, and with the self-efficacy and rationality to actually do so.

What I experienced at the Solstice was not merely a reminder or a symbol, but a manifestation of the things I care about most. It was a secular sacrament, in the Catholic sense of the word.

In the winter when I am isolated, I am consumed by fear and despair. On the night of the Solstice, participating in that sacrament along side others working effectively toward the same goals, singing about the march of progress and our plans for the future, I witnessed the power of a motivated community of humans to drive back the darkness.

At one point, footage from the International Space Station was projected onto a large screen. As we watched together from our vantage point in space--while the lights of civilization glittered beneath us, and as dawn broke over the homeworld--there was one shared emotion, invoked by the power of ritual, resonating and amplifying through the minds of everyone present. It felt as if a single brilliant beam of resolution were shining toward the future of humanity.

The Secular Solstice is still new, still developing rapidly and trying to find its feet. If you want to nurture this idea and watch what happens, I recommend that you support the Secular Solstice though the Kickstarter campaign.

[This post brought to you by Structured Procrastination.]

I used to teach swing dance. To many of my students watching me dance, it looked like what made me an excellent dancer was my extensive vocabulary. I seemed to know all the moves. It didn't matter what the lead threw at me. I always knew how to respond. "How many years did it take you to learn all those moves?" they'd sometimes ask.

It used to be that when I was watching much stronger rationalists than myself, I'd get a similar feeling. Whatever their goals and whatever obstacles they encountered, they seemed to know exactly the right technique to deal with it. Like they somehow knew every possible move.

Thinking about my dance students, I recognize that it's a totally reasonable mistake to make. They were learning swing dance themselves, and what was I teaching in their class? Basic step, inside turn, outside turn, transition from open to closed position, etc. Explicitly, I was teaching them more and more moves.

Implicitly, I was trying to teach them how to dance, which to any experienced dancer does not mean knowing a lot of moves. I had to teach them a few standard movement patterns so they'd have something to work with. But when I design a lesson series, my focus is always, unwavering, on conveying a few central principles of swing dance and partner dance generally.

I think I've recently reached a level of cognitive development where I'm starting to see deeper patterns in other peoples' arts as rationalists. What makes them great is not how many moves they know. That might be correlated, but the central principles that allow them to employ those techniques reliably, and to create entirely new techniques as circumstances require, lie elsewhere. Finding them is surely more valuable than any specific technique.

When I taught all those moves in dance classes, my deeper purpose was to teach pulse, partner connection, playfulness, and musicality. In that order. I taught the basic pattern of six-count swing--step, step, rock-step--so the students could practice pulsing in time with the beat of the music while moving their feet. I taught the transition from open to closed position so the lead could practice requesting something of the follow using only his body (asking her to come toward him, in this case), and the follow could practice listening for, understanding, and responding to such requests.

I occasionally gave them unusual restrictions, like, "When you dance this song, the only part of your partner's body you can touch is their elbow, and you can only touch it with your elbow." This was not to teach them elbow-based moves. It was to cut them off from all their cached moves, so they had to experiment, to play together with their partner.

I taught brief segments of choreography and had the students dance that same string of moves to a lot of different songs, not so they would have a cool string of moves to pull out at any time, but so they could practice dancing the same moves differently, according to what they felt in the music. Does the song call for sharp, precise movements, or languid, flowing movements? Does the outside turn fall in a measure with a strong emphasis, or should it be small and understated? What if the lead dances to the clarinet while the follow dances to the fiddle? Does this string of moves simply feel wrong when danced to this song? That's musicality.

What makes me a great dancer, and a great follow in particular, cannot possibly be my vocabulary. Sometimes I go to dances with completely unfamiliar vocabularies--salsa, tango, waltz--and even then I stand out as a highly skilled follow. I don't know beforehand the standard "signal" a lead would give in Salsa to indicate that I should step backward. I wasn't in the class where they taught that. I don't need to know those sorts of things, though, if I can establish a strong enough partner connection.

I imagine that a master rationalist who happens to have never heard of "goal factoring" probably doesn't really need anybody to explain it to her. There will surely remain gaps in her art that can be filled simply by pointing them out, so maybe she will benefit from hearing the term. But I doubt she stands to gain much from taking a class on goal factoring.

In the first twenty seconds of a dance, I will learn how to dance with my lead. I'll learn the way he moves, what aspects of the music he prefers to express, the patterns of tension and relaxation in his muscles, how his rhythm shifts slightly when he's about to break a pattern he'd established earlier. And by reading his reactions to my responses, I'll learn how those things correspond to his intentions.

It's not a conscious process; it feels very much like I'm simply reading his mind. One of the highest complements I ever get on my dancing is when a lead tells me that it feels to him as though I'm reading his mind. Once your partner connection becomes that strong, classes on how to execute various moves are superfluous.

What is the equivalent of partner connection in rationality? I'm not sure. I have some vague guesses, but at this point I think I'm only dimly aware that there is one.

I expect that the primary value of this analogy, though, is in the path to mastery it suggests, the methods of training that will eventually lead me to mastery of the central principles, whatever they are.

I think in the beginning, shortly after encountering the Sequences and CFAR, I implicitly believed that becoming a strong rationalist meant gaining all the important insights. I thought it meant having a toolbox and filling it with more and better tools. Like feeling the lead's right hand go up, and knowing to execute the steps of the "outside turn" I learned last week.

And how does one gain a new tool? Why, one browses the aisles of the rationalist hardware store and picks up whatever looks shiny and affordable. The point of reading another Sequence article or attending another CFAR class is to pick up a new cognitive procedure, so you can retrieve it from your toolbox when the situation calls for that particular tool. Right?

Maybe, but not if the analogy to mastering dance is accurate.

I didn't become the kind of dancer I am by taking a lot of classes or reading a lot of books on dance. I did it by dancing.

It certainly is important that I took a lot of classes, especially in the beginning. But not so much because of the classes themselves. When I was traveling to dance workshops and conferences every weekend, I was dancing constantly with new partners of all styles and skill levels, and thinking always about the next weakness I needed to overcome as a dancer. All of that dancing gave me lots of data on myself as a dancer, and I would use it to set specific intentions designed to address my main weakness before each dance.

For example, I once thought, "My bottleneck right now seems to be that I dance heavily, which makes fast tempos almost impossible. Maybe simply imagining that I am as light as a feather will fix it. Today, I'll experiment with dancing like objects of various weights. A feather, an elephant, a bouncy ball, a bowling ball."

So almost all of my training occurred on the social dance floor by constant focused experimentation. I eventually caught on to this and started saving money by traveling to workshops just to attend the social dances, rather than paying for the lesson series on top of it.

I also hung out with other dancers at dinner and during breaks, and was especially friendly with dancers with more skill and experience than I had. Since dancers never shut up about dance when they're around other dancers, I did my best to absorb all of their wisdom. Improving in this way was almost never a matter of gaining a totally new insight or hearing a fact I didn't already know about dance. I was not shopping for tools to add to my toolbox. Rather, hearing about the experiences and interests of others influenced my own improvisation. It suggested experiments I'd otherwise not have thought of, or inspired questions about myself as a dancer that it hadn't before occurred to me to ask.

This is how I've been approaching rationality of late. I choose one particular weakness to focus on. I look for opportunities to observe myself making the associated mistakes. I set a specific intention to respond in a particular way the next few times. I watch what happens, and then I let that experience influence my next experiment.

There are other things influencing the experimentation process, of course. My friends, my mentors, blog posts, books. The same sources I've always relied on in my training as a rationalist. What has changed is that I'm not really looking for answers from them anymore. I don't expect them to hand me exactly the right tool to solve my problem. It's great when they can, but it's rare, and it's not their job anyway. I'm the one inside my head. Instead, I consider them inputs to which I can respond as I improvise.

I've been trying to focus for the past couple weeks on things other than my weaknesses in case I can learn to teach them, or use my observations about them to boost my learning process in the future. I've come to the end of a particular series of experiments though, and it seems that my brain has automatically reverted to studying a salient weakness. Like it or not, I'm now improvising on the theme of noticing confusion. I observe mistakes carefully, I ask new questions, I keep my ears open for related bits of advice from others, and I try out new ways of responding, sometimes for good reasons and sometimes on a whim. Just like I did with dance.




In dance, I can respond instantly to instructions never encountered before, or to nuances in songs of unfamiliar styles. I've molded my own patterns of thought and feeling to partner connection, playfulness, and musicality. It's not that I've somehow fit every possible tool into my toolbox. It's that I myself have become a fully versatile instrument of dance. (A far from perfect one, but the point is that I've moved a long way in that direction.)

Taking classes to learn new moves can definitely be useful, especially when you're first starting out. But it is not a recipe for indefinite progress at an increasing rate, and that is the sort of thing I will need to become a fully versatile instrument of rationality.

(h/t Julia Galef for making me aware of the photo via her excellent TAM talk)

I haven't made "noticing and responding appropriately to confusion" a special explicit focus of my training as a rationalist so far, so I expect there are several things I'm doing wrong that will become obvious quickly upon closer inspection. But I think I just realized a huge mistake I've been making anyway.

When I am confused, I focus on the thing that I am confused about. I know it means I believe something false, and I want to find out what that thing is. My automatic procedure for doing so is, "Investigate the object of confusion for clues to my false belief, then search nearby objects for clues."

In Zen terms, I'm looking at the pointing finger instead of at the moon.

Check out this image. Look at it for a while, if you've never seen it before, before reading on.

I noticed the rock immediately, and I flagged it as confusing. My automatic interpretation was, "Someone threw a rock at that raccoon, and it's about to get hit, oh no!" That felt like an awfully strange, though, so I took a really close look at the rock. I started looking at other elements of the picture. I couldn't find anything strange about it (although I do see a strange thing now that I know what's up with this picture), so I looked around within the picture for other clues. I noticed that the raccoon on the left didn't have the dark markings around its eyes I'm used to raccoons having. I noticed the raccoons are in a slightly unusual environment for the species, since I think of them as preferring to be hidden and in low places.

I did not ask myself, "What do I believe about this picture that makes me confused about the rock? What are other possible interpretations of this picture? If it's not the case that that raccoon is about to be hit by a rock, what else might be going on?"

Upon noticing confusion, I've been going through these mental motions: "Don't ignore or rationalize the confusion. Pay attention to it. Be curious about what false things you believe." It's like I've been putting off examining my own beliefs for errors by examining my observations.

Next time, I'll try this: "If I notice that I am confused, then I will state what I believe about the situation that forbids the confusing thing, and then generate alternative hypotheses. Only then will I examine the situation closely to see which hypothesis best fits my observations."

Correct movement: Notice which of my beliefs forbids the confusing thing.
Incorrect movement: Look really hard at the confusing thing.

I suppose I did manage to look at the moon, though, when my response to having noticed confusion about this picture failed to lead me to the correct answer. "I'm confused about noticing confusion. Am I noticing confusion wrong? How do I actually notice confusion? How else should I maybe be doing it?"

ETA: Apparently it was not obvious to some that I intend for you to work out for yourself what's actually going on with the rock. Here's a hint: Suppose I'd swapped "clouds" for "moon".

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the study of the structures of experience and consciousness. Literally, it is the study of "that which appears". The first time you look at a twig sticking up out of the water, you might be curious and ask, "What forces cause things to bend when placed in water?" If you're a curious phenomenologist, though, you'll ask things like, "Why does that twig in water appear as though bent? Do other things appear to bend when placed in water? Do all things placed in water appear to bend to the same degree? Are there things that do not appear to bend when placed in water? Does my perception of the bending depend on the angle or direction from which I observe the twig?"

Pehenomenology means breaking experience down to its more basic components, and being precise in our descriptions of what we actually observe, free of further speculation and assumption. A phenomenologist recognizes the difference between observing "a six-sided cube", and observing the three faces, at most, from which we extrapolate the rest.

I consider phenomenology to be a central skill of rationality. The most obvious example: You're unlikely to generate alternative hypotheses when the confirming observation and the favored hypothesis are one and the same in your experience of experience. The importance of phenomenology to rationality goes deeper than that, though. Phenomenology trains especially fine grained introspection. The more tiny and subtle are the thoughts you're aware of, the more precise can be the control you gain over the workings of your mind, and the faster can be your cognitive reflexes.

(I do not at all mean to say that you should go read Husserl and Heidegger. Despite their apparent potential for unprecedented clarity, the phenomenologists, without exception, seem to revel in obfuscation. It's probably not worth your time to wade through all of that nonsense. I've mostly read about phenomenology myself for this very reason.)

I've been doing some experimental phenomenology of late.

Noticing

I've noticed that rationality, in practice, depends on noticing. Some people have told me this is basically tautological, and therefore uninteresting. But if I'm right, I think it's likely very important to know, and to train deliberately.

The difference between seeing the twig as bent and seeing the twig as seeming bent may seem inane. It is not news that things that are bent tend to seem bent. Without that level of granularity in your observations, though, you may not notice that it could be possible for things to merely seem bent without being bent. When we're talking about something that may be ubiquitous to all applications of rationality, like noticing, it's worth taking a closer look at the contents of our experiences.

Many people talk about "noticing confusion", because Eliezer's written about it. Really, though, every successful application of a rationality skill begins with noticing. In particular, applied rationality is founded on noticing opportunities and obstacles. (To be clear, I'm making this up right this moment, so as far as I know it's not a generally agreed-upon thing. That goes for nearly everything in this post. I still think it's true.) You can be the most technically skilled batter in the world, and it won't help a bit if you consistently fail to notice when the ball whizzes by you--if you miss the opportunities to swing. And you're not going to run very many bases if you launch the ball straight at an opposing catcher--if you're oblivious to the obstacles.

It doesn't matter how many techniques you've learned if you miss all the opportunities to apply them, and fail to notice the obstacles when they get in your way. Opportunities and obstacles are everywhere. We can only be as strong as our ability to notice the ones that will make a difference.

Inspired by Whales' self-experiment in noticing confusion, I've been practicing noticing things. Not difficult or complicated things, like noticing confusion, or noticing biases. I've just been trying to get a handle on noticing, full stop. And it's been interesting.

Noticing Rain

I started by checking to see what I expected it to feel like to notice that it's raining, just going from memory. (It doesn't rain much in Berkeley, so it had been a while.) I tried for a split-second prediction, to find what my brain automatically stored under "noticing rain". When I thought about noticing rain, I got this sort of vague impression of rainyness, which included few sensory details and was more of an overall rainy feeling. My brain tried to tell me that "noticing rain" meant "being directly aquainted with rainyness", in much the same way that it tries to tell me it's experiencing a cube when it's actually only experiencing a pattern of light and shadows I interpret as three faces. I could have reasoned carefully and worked out a far more accurate prediction, but that's not what I was after.

Then, I waited for rain. It didn't take long, because I'm in North Carolina for the month.

The real "noticing rain" turned out to be a response to the physical sensations concurrent with the first raindrop falling on my skin. I did eventually have an "abstract rainyness feeling", but that happened a full two seconds later. My actual experience went like this.

It was cloudy and humid. This was not at the forefront of my attention, but it slowly moved in that direction as the temperature dropped. I was fairly focused on reading a book.

(I'm a little baffled by the apparent gradient between "not at all conscious of x" and "fully aware of x". I don't know how that works, but I experience the difference between being a little aware of the sky being cloudy and being focused on the patterns of light in the clouds, as analogous to the difference between being very-slightly-but-not-uncomfortably warm and burning my hand on the stove.)

My awareness of something like an "abstract rainyness feeling" moved further toward consciousness as the wind picked up. Suddenly--and the suddenness was an important part of the experience--I felt something like a cool, dull pin-prick on my arm. I looked at it, saw the water, and recognized it as a raindrop. Over the course of about half a second, several sensations leapt forward into full awareness: the darkness of my surroundings, the humidity in the air, the dark grey-blueness of the sky, the sound of rain on leaves like television static, the scent of ozone and damp earth, the feeling of cool humid wind on my face, and the word "rain" in my internal monologue.

I think it is that sudden leaping forward of many associated sensations that I would call "noticing rain".

After that, I felt a sort of mental step backward--though it was more like a zooming out or sliding away than a discrete step--from the sensations, and then a feeling of viewing them from the outside. There was a sensation of the potential to access other memories of times when it's rained.

(Sensations of potential are fascinating to me. I noticed a few weeks ago that after memorizing a list of names and faces, I could predict in the first half second of seeing the face whether or not I'd be able to retrieve the name in the next five seconds. Before I actually retrieved the name. What??? I don't know either.)

Only then did all of it resolve into the more distant and abstract "feeling of rainyness" that I'd predicted before. The resolution took four times as long as the simultaneous-leaping-into-consciousness-of-related-sensations that I now prefer to call "noticing", and ten times as long as the first-raindrop-pin-prick, which I think I'll call the "noticing trigger" if it turns out to be a general class of pre-noticing experiences.

("Can you really distinguish between 200 and 500 milliseconds?" Yes, but it's an acquired skill. I spent a block of a few minutes every day for a month, then several blocks a day for about a week, doing this Psychomotor Vigiliance Task when I was gathering data for the polyphasic sleep experiment. It gives you fast feedback on simple response time. I'm not sure if it's useful for anything else, but it comes in handy when taking notes on experiences that pass very quickly.)

Noticing Red Barn Roofs

What These Silly Tests Are Really About

[Content note: Depression, self harm, social anxiety, eating disorders.]

Several people (at least five) have asked me recently about my experiences coping with depression. In response, I've put together a list of interventions I've tried, and what happened. There are probably lots of things missing from all parts of this list. I have a bit of a memory problem here, because I'm sort of two different people, and since the depressed version of me is sleeping, her past experiences aren't very available to me. But here are the things that are salient right now. I think I've probably gotten all the really big ones.

About my history: I've gotten depressed during the winter since puberty, and probably earlier. It's gotten worse all my life up through age 21 or so. I began purposful recovery three years ago (maybe four?) when it didn't get better during the spring.

Things that have helped me with Seasonal Affective Disorder

in order (mostly) of apparent effect size:

• UPDATE 2/17/2016: We have a winner! Although I've tried light boxes in the past and seen no improvement, it turns out there just aren't any sufficiently powerful light boxes on the market. Eliezer built me a mighty patronus so effective that I didn't get depressed this winter at all. I'm still on bupropion, so I don't yet know if the lights are enough without that, but I plan to go off of the meds this summer and see what happens next winter. Instructions for building a LUMINATOR, as he calls it, are available here.
• It not being winter. Duh. Didn't realize this was useful to know until it finally occurred to me that I might try moving to the southern hemisphere for the US winter. Giving that a go this time around. The plan is to come back in mid February so I can try out a few more interventions without having to put up with an entire winter's worth of depression should they fail. [UPDATE 2/17/2016: I didn't have a great time going to Chile by myself for four months, but it was definitely the right decision.
• Bupropion (300mg/day sustained release)
• I started this during the deepest depths of depression I've so far experienced, and it pulled me out.
• This took care of most of the problem.
• There was still enough of the problem left to be minorly crippling. I can be a student or hold a job during the winter if my life depends on it. I'm still almost constantly suffering in the winter, though. My concentration, creativity, and ambition are nearly totally shot from late fall through late spring, and I sink deeply enough into "my dark side" that compassion is just about impossible, and my most common form of positive emotion is cold amusement. I'm not going to go into any further details about having depression here. (I do talk a bit about it in these two posts.) Just trying to let you know approximately where I stand with it at the moment.
Curing my social anxiety.
• I had to get my depression mostly under control before this was even thinkable.
• but they're really a nasty combination. Depression is much easier to deal with without social anxiety.
• I'd probably be even better off if I weren't also introverted, but changing that is not the next thing on my to-do list. [UPDATE 2/17/2016: It is now, and I'm making progress that I'm bound to write about eventually.]
• If you want to hear about effective interventions for social anxiety, skip down to "And so it began." in the "Lob's Theorem Cured My Social Anxiety" (which, in addition to being the title of one of my most popular posts, has been noted as taking the cake for the most Lesswrongian phrase ever). For the crazy mysterious thing that kicked it once and for all, read to the end. But I don't actually expect that last thing to work for other people.
• Eating enough and regularly
• It took me a ridiculously long time to figure out that this was a thing.
• My mood gets way, way worse when I'm hungry. Unfortunately, all sorts of things come together to prevent me from eating.
• For one, my stomach is apparently the last part of me to notice that I'm hungry, and for a long time I didn't believe people who told me I should eat, unless my stomach agreed with them. I suspect this has something to do with the bupropion, since it reduces appetite reliably enough to be prescribed as a weight-loss drug.
• I was poor for a long time, so most of the food available was sufficiently uninteresting that it took pretty extreme hunger before cooking and eating was better than continuing to be hungry.
• Cooking takes time and energy. Turns out there's some fairly tasty frozen food these days. I was not aware of this until recently.
• Depression is not good for body image, and I didn't want to become what felt like "even more fat".
• My body is apparently excellent at homeostasis; instead of losing weight, it mostly just shuts down all non-vital processes when I starve myself. And I guess it doesn't consider much of my brain necessary. I only actually lose weight from exercise. When I hadn't realized this was possible, I thought the fact that I wasn't losing weight was strong evidence that I was eating plenty.
• In retrospect, I think the sensation of extreme hunger probably distracted me from the psychological pain in the same way cutting myself did, so I wasn't so quick to stop it. (Useful self-harm thing I learned recently: Sticking your hand in a bucket of ice water is really painful, but harmless for 15-minute periods. If you use a mixing bowl instead of a large bucket, the ice will heat up to a non-harmful temperature before it could possibly be a problem.)
• UPDATE 2/17/2016: For the past month or so, I've been eating Meal Squares with whole milk for about 2/3 of my food, and it's wonderful. I no longer have food problems. I eat regular food when I feel like it, and Meal Squares when I don't. My energy levels are more stable than I remember them ever being, and I've lost somewhere between 5 to 10 pounds of fat (which I'm happy to lose) so far while still gaining muscle (I could do zero pullups a month ago, and can do 3 now). I think I could pretty easily stop losing weight by simply eating more, but because I have far fewer food cravings, and because my energy stays so even and it now takes at least an hour before I start to lose concentration when I'm hungry, it's very easy to eat *just* enough.
• Daily or near-daily exercise.
• It's been very important to use exercise I actuallyenjoy. For me, that's mostly meant running, and especially running outside. When I'm down, it's much easier to convince myself to go explore a trail through a forest than to slog along on a treadmill for half an hour.
• When I injured myself and couldn't run for a long time, it was a huge problem. When I was on campus, I could largely make up for it by dancing. But in El Cerrito last winter, dancing was too far away. I turned out not to enjoy swimming enough, plus it was relatively inconvenient.
• I ended up mostly doing weightlifting last winter, which was not nearly as good as cardiovascular exercise, but was better than no exercise.
• When I finally got a bike, it turned out to be better than weightlifting, but not as good as running. Probably just because I don't like it enough to do enough of it to wear me out more than once or twice a week. If you like cycling, I expect this will work fine.
• Learning to think of my pain as objectless when it was objectless.
• It's easier to get stuck in a harmful obsessive cycle when you believe you're sad or angry about something. Early on, I'd let myself direct my feelings at a person or situation. Since I knew from experience that talking to the person or changing the situation wouldn't have much of an effect on how I felt, so I'd just agonize over the thing endlessly.
• Installing robust anti-rationalization habits kept my beliefs in line with the truth, and the truth was harder to obsess over. It was too diffuse and abstract to really latch onto emotionally. (For more cognitive skills I picked up as a result of dealing with depression, check out Corrupted Hardware: Things I Learned From My Broken Brain.)
• This had two main effects. One was that I directed what energy I had toward finding actions that had actually helped me feel better in the past (like exercising, going outside, talking to someone, or even eating chocolate).
• But very often when you're depressed, there's just nothing you can do. You're going to feel like shit no matter what happens. I have what might be a weird way of dealing with this.
• Most distance runners are familiar with the sensation of coming up against a wall of exhaustion. There are a few ways people push through it.
• Some people distract themselves. They try to get really into the music they're listening to, or they think really hard about what they're going to make for dinner.
• A second type of runner focuses on the goal. They have thoughts like, "Just another half mile and I can stop. That's just a few minutes. I can put up with this for a few minutes. Just stick it out 'til then." This sort of person usually knows how far they've gone, how long they've been running, and how long they have left.
• I'm a third type. What I do when I encounter a wall of exhaustion is imagine that it will never ever end ever. I take note of the specific sensations I'm feeling--the burning in my muscles and lungs, the desperate desire to give up, the overall tremendous discomfort--and I pretend that this is just how my life is now, and how it will be forever. And there's nothing I can do about it. So I'd better just find some way to exist in this state. Maybe I can even adjust my appraisals of the sensations so I end up wanting to feel like this. (I should note that I am both a masochist and a submissive, so I may have unusual psychology that lets me submit to pain when others couldn't.)
• So it might be that noticing you feel like shit and you can't do anything about it ought to be your cue to distract yourself. I used to do that, actually, but it wasn't really sustainable for me. It turned me into a workaholic, and I eventually burned out.
• Or maybe it means you should focus on getting through this particular rough patch. "Just three more hours, then I can go home." I have a hard time imagining what it would be like to be the kind of person who could benefit from that, but I'd not be at all surprised to hear that it does actually work for some people, given what I know of runners, and given how many times I've heard the phrase "one day at a time".
• Having fun reasons to spend time outside.
• It's really hard for me to just go outside for no reason when I'm depressed. And being told to go outside feels like a punishment. This may be a leftover psychological response to when my dad and his wife would tell my brother and I to go play outside (presumably mostly because they wanted to be left alone). I'm actually not quite sure what's up with this, because I like sunshine. *shrugs*
• Excusesto go outside, however, work great. They don't even have to be good excuses. Walking to the store even though I could just as easily drive, for example. Going to the park to read with my toes in the fountain. (I live in California where we don't have real winter. You might substitute "building a snowman".) Going on adventures is always good for me. I'm especially happy to leave the house and be outside for a while if there's food at the other end of the adventure, so traveling to restaurants and coffee shops is great.
• Waking up early.
• This sounds like a no-brainer, since waking up early means maximizing your exposure to sunlight. It's likely this deserves a place at the top of the list for you.
• For me, it's all the way down here because I've found it extremely difficult to maintain. One of my symptoms is insomnia, so waking up early often means getting little enough sleep that it's a huge energy drain.
• Melatonin helped a lot, though, as did building an elaborate bedtime ritual. The bedtime ritual made it easier to go to bed on time, and the melatonin increased my quality of sleep so I felt more refreshed after fewer hours of sleep.
• Translating feelings of despair into feelings of exhaustion.
• This actually helped almost as much as exercise, but it took a really long time to learn. Well, that's not quite true. Once I thought of it, I could do it almost immediately. But I think it required a whole bunch of other skills that I had to learn first, like thinking of my pain as objectless, having conversations with personified parts of myself, and adopting new mental postures on purpose (like Val's "againstness" training.)
• This is a super useful trick if you can manage it, though. I find it much easier to cope with being tired all the time than with being painfully sad or completely emotionally empty.
• Borrowing my friends' brains.
• It can be hard to be friends with a depressed person. Not so much because they're always being sad at you, as because there seems to be nothing you can do to help. Consequently, people seem to actually like it when when I ask them for specific small things that will actually help me.
• In particular, what I have in mind is outsourcing straightforward cognitive tasks that you just can't manage right now even though you have to.
• I don't recall a specific instance of countering depression with this just now, but here's one from anxiety. Once, when I pulled the car over because I was having a panic attack, I found that my brain wasn't working well enough to generate possible solutions. So I called a friend whom I trusted to make generally good decisions, and asked to borrow his brain. I told him what was happening, and asked him what he thought I should do. He told me to try to relax for a few minutes, then, if I couldn't drive, text him my location and he'd come by with another person who'd pick me up, and he'd take my car home for me. It's an obvious plan when your brain is working properly, but non-obvious when you're panicking or thinking through dense brain fog.
• Modafinil
• This actually makes me feel almost completely better. I end up a bit unstable, subject to mood swings, but I get what at first feels like a huge flood of ambition, creativity, and concentration that is probably mostly just my summertime self reemerging.
• Unfortunately, I seem to become habituated after about three days.
• It also makes me feel like like I'm on the edge of a panic attack for hours at a time, which is definitely not pleasant.
• Bonus effect: It seems to make orgasms way more awesome. I have no idea what that's about. Many they're only awesome compared to wintertime orgasms, and normal for summertime orgasms. I haven't kept careful track of my experience of sex and sexuality across the seasons, except to notice that I'm almost completely asexual when depressed, and only mostly asexual when I'm not. [UPDATE 2/17/2016: Things are actually considerably more complicated than that.]
• Commitment mechanisms
• These are quite effective when I pick the right ones. Many a time have my past selves pulled my future selves kicking and screaming through necessary responsibilities.
• They're also dangerous. Turns out if I force myself to deal with too many things, I do in fact completely crash. This is how I ended up taking an incomplete in every single class at the end of one semester.
• I now use commitment mechanisms very sparingly and as a last resort. It's often better to simply not do the thing.
• Happify.com. Happify is gamified cognitive behavioral therapy/positive psychology. I kept this up for about two months before I got distracted by the existence of HPMOR, CFAR, Lesswrong, Leverage, Eliezer, and the Bay Area. I think it was probably helping in small but consistent ways.

Things I've tried that haven't had perceptible effects on me

• Fluoxetine (aka Prosac, an SSRI)
• I tried this during the deepest depths of depression I've so far experienced, and it didn't pull me out. I've not tried it since then.
• Spending half an hour in front of a SAD light box in the morning every day for three weeks.
• Yes, I know. I notice that I'm confused as well.
• It might not have been a powerful enough light.
• I probably need more than 30 minutes.
• I might need to surround myself in lights rather than having one sitting directly in front of me.
• I might need to actually look straight at the light instead of reading in front of it.
• I might need repeated exposure throughout the day instead of just one stretch in the morning.
• I might need a different color of light--this one had a cold blue clinical color that made me sad.
• Everything I've ever read about SAD says something in this direction should work. This is almost certainly worth trying if you haven't, even though I didn't respond to it.
• Light therapy is something I'll be giving another shot. I would have tried modifications, like more powerful lights, the first time around, but the problem with ineffective depression interventions is that when they don't work, trying again is really hard. Similarly for trying other things after the first thing only worked a little bit.
• UPDATE 2/17/2016: THIS WORKED! I'M FREE! I just needed more and brighter lights for a longer time. It's February and I've been 100% not-clinically-depressed all winter. I get sad sometimes, but only in healthy normal ways. I am now completely cured of SAD, as long as I keep my lights with me during winter. Here are instructions for building a LUMINATOR like mine.
• Vitamin D supplements.
• This is something I did give a second shot two years later. This time, I made sure I had the right form of D (D3), and the other vitamin needed to process it, namely K2.
• Still didn't seem to help.
• Reading letters to my dark side from my summer self. This actually has very perceptible effects, I'm just not sure if they're net good or net bad. I think the correct evaluation is probably "dangerous". I probably have a lot of things to say about what it's like to be made aware that you're two people with distinct value sets, but this is probably not the post for it.
• It's important to note that the patient is often the last person to notice improvement. It's possible to be almost completely recovered and not know because you still feel like shit, despite the rest of your life having put itself back together. So these things may have actually helped, and I just didn't notice. On the other hand, neither did Eliezer when he observed the results last winter.

Interventions with net negative effects

• Caffeine
• This drastically improves my concentration, creativity, and motivation, though it doesn't have as strong of an effect on my mood as modafinil.
• I've sworn it off, though, because I become not just habituated but horribly dependent very quickly. And I become quite a bit more depressed during withdraw than I'd be if I'd never touched the stuff.
• It also starts fucking with sleep big time as soon as I'm dependent enough that I can't function in the evening without using it right up until bedtime.
• Caffeine is largely responsible for the big crash that plunged me into the depressive state that finally started me toward purposeful recovery.
• Alcohol
• This was actually supposed to be an intervention for social anxiety, not depression. It was very effective for social anxiety.
• But it increases my depression for a day or two after I use it.
• I've stopped drinking alcohol entirely since noticing this at the beginning of last winter. UPDATE 2/17/2016: I now drink small amounts of alcohol occasionally, maybe two drinks a month. I'm still noticeably less happy and energetic the next day, but it doesn't seem psychologically dangerous like it is when I'm depressed.
• Marijuana
• This provided a much-needed respite when I used it occasionally during my workaholic period.
• But I'm pretty sure it caused the same downswing that alcohol did. It's hard to tell since I'd often smoke and drink simultaneously, and I'd often stay up too late while stoned, then compensate with extra caffeine the next day.
• This would probably be worth some more experimentation were it not for the fact that ever since I started taking bupripion, weed has given me all of the paranoia and none of the buzz.
• Feeling guilty
• I never would have thought of this as a possible intervention if I hadn't read Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh, who apparently gets just about everything done no matter her mood by noticing how horrible she'd feel about herself if she didn't do it. (Also, her depiction of being depressed [1, 2] is DEAD FUCKING ON and beautiful.)
• Feeling like a bad person has approximately zero power to deter me from something, and in certain moods it has the opposite effect.
• Attempts by myself or others to make me feel guilty simply shut me down. My response is either, "Pfft, fuck this shit," or "Never mind, I'm no longer interested. I'll just sit here in a ball sobbing until I starve to death".
• But hey, maybe it'll work for you. Mindspace is deep and wide.

Things I plan to try in the future

• More, brighter, differently colored lights for longer periods and at different times of day. UPDATE 2/17/2016 This worked! See above under "light boxes" for more details.
• Modifying my medication, either by increasing the dosage or by adding supplemental meds.
• A variety of dietary supplements I need to research some more but have heard tell might help. UPDATE 2/17/2016: I've been taking Equilibrium. Unfortunately, since I started in the fall, I can't distinguish its effect from the effect of the lights. If you try this independently of other interventions, I'd love to hear about it!

Hope that helps. I'm completely open about this topic (and pretty much all topics, really), so feel free to ask questions.

I sometimes let imaginary versions of myself make decisions for me.

I just found out a friend of mine has died of cancer.

Things farther to the left take less time to learn, while things farther to the right require some combination of processing time, many iterations, and long strings of dependencies on other skills that must be acquired serially. While "difficult" and "takes a long time to learn" may be highly correlated, I don't think they're the same thing.

It can take a child quite a while to learn long division. You generally need to lean addition in order to learn subtraction and multiplication, multiplication in order to learn division, and the final procedure that leads to the right answer, which depends on multiplication and subtraction (and division, if you want to be efficient). All together that can take a long time.

But once you've got all the pieces of basic arithmetic, the final procedure is pretty easy. If you've got detailed instructions in front of you, it can even be carried out correctly on the very first try. And the pieces themselves are pretty straightforward, especially if you recognize that the execution of algorithms will suffice, and deep understanding isn't strictly necessary. It may be a long and complex process if you've never seen arithmetic before, but the greatest inferential gap is either between addition and multiplication or between multiplication and division. Those are leaps average gradeschoolers can make. No individual part is all that difficult to get your head around.

But consider the simplest problems in elementary algebra. In addition to the basic arithmetic operations, you need two more pieces: "doing the same thing to both sides of the equals sign", and "variable". "Doing the same thing to both sides of the equals sign" is a even easier than "the procedure for long division".

But "variable" is fundamentally different. It requires a new kind of idea. It requires abstraction, which is not only new but inferentially distant. It may even be the greatest inferential gap a child must cross in traditional math education up to pre-calculus. It isn't a complex idea, though, and there's not really such a thing as "half-way understanding variable". You get it or you don't, and when you get it, elementary algebra suddenly makes sense. "Variable" is probably an epiphany. And it's a difficult enough epiphany that, according to Jo Boaler, a great many adults never do have it.

I think the Lesswrong Sequences are mostly good for a few epiphanies. They're largely boot-strapping sorts of epiphanies, which re-order your mind in ways that allow for further epiphanies. But they're still epiphanies. They're skills that are difficult to gain but happen all at once, in this case over the course of reading a blog post. They're mostly things of the form "understanding X" or "realizing that Y". And most of the potential lessons of the sequences are fairly difficult unless you happen to have a mind with exactly the right arrangement, which is part of why most people don't have their whole mind rearranged once per post. So the Sequences mostly exist in the upper left corner of the skill acquisition grid.

CFAR workshops occupy the whole left half of the grid. Most of what's taught in the actual classes falls in the bottom left--quick and easy--because the lessons are only fifty minutes, and they're mostly practical instead of conceptual. Rather than lecturing you for an hour, as though reading several Sequence posts aloud, they're more like, "Here is a procedure that is surprisingly domain-generally useful. Let's practice."

For example, CFAR teaches Trigger-Action Planning, known in the Cog Sci literature as "implementation intentions". It's got even more bang for the effortful buck than memory palaces, because the effect size is similarly enormous, but it helps with anything that can be broken down into concrete triggers and concrete actions. And all it takes is learning to compose specific enough if-then statements, like so: "If I hear my alarm in the morning, then I will hop out of bed immediately." Other bug patches CFAR installs include Murphey Jitsu, Goal Factoring, Focused Grit, and Againstness. (Don't worry, I'll discuss exceptions to this in a minute.)

The rest of the CFAR experience, the socialization outside of classes, usually causes at least one epiphany. Participants have conversations with instructors and other participants, and since everybody there is carefully selected to be bright, curious, and interesting in diverse ways, there's always somebody saying, "Wow, I've never thought of that!"

CFAR teaches one lesson from the bottom right quadrant: Comfort Zone Expansion, or CoZE. CoZE is basically CFAR's take on exposure therapy. Exposure therapy can take a long time. Though you might see progress right away, you're usually not going to wipe out a deep fear or anxiety in a single go. It takes repeated exposure with a slow and steady increase in intensity.

But exposure therapy is fairly easy! Scary, though by design not very scary, but not difficult. The principle is not hard to understand, the procedure is straightforward, and there's just not much more to it than that. It takes time, is all. So CFAR devotes a lot more time to CoZE than to the other units. There's a standard 50minute CoZE prep class, and there's an entire evening devoted to the "CoZE outing", where everybody goes off for hours in search of repeated exposure to a feared stimulus. CoZE is a tortoise skill. "Slow and steady wins the race." It relies almost entirely on small, consistent efforts.

Some of CFAR's other lessons may be close to the middle of the X axis, but I don't think there are any others that must necessarily take many iterations to properly install.

There is one skillset CFAR attempts to impart in a class format that I think falls in the top right quadrent: Bayesian reasoning. It is not merely an epiphany, and if you want a version that works in real life, it is not a bug patch. When last I saw it (June 2014), the Bayes unit was not up to the same standard as the Bug Patch units or CoZE, and I think I may now understand a big chunk of why.

Bayesian reasoning depends on some pretty mind-twisty habits of thought. Not only are the skills difficult to attain, but they require a combination of long processing time, many iterations, and long strings of dependencies. It takes a couple epiphanies, a few bug patches, lots of habit installation, and the long and difficult process of weaving all of that together into fully Bayesian patterns of thought and feeling. A two-hour class is simply not the right format to get all of that done.

[CFAR does offer six weeks of 1-on-1s for all participants, so there's more room for imparting Tortoise skills than the workshop itself allows. But those are extremely personalized, more like counseling than the usual sort of teaching, and it's hard for them to scale in the same way as the Sequences or the standard batch of CFAR units, so I'm not discussing those so much.]

Wizard skillsets like Bayesian reasoning are definitely possible to attain. I think almost all of it, if not all of it, happens by acquiring components from the other three quadrants and weaving them together over time. If there are rationality skills that primitively require slow and difficult aquisition, I don't know what they are. Most of the really badass epistemic skills, I suspect, are Wizard skills. And so far, CFAR plus the Sequences seldom seem to be enough to get people there.

I've learned some hard things. I've learned to prove theorems of nonstandard mathematics that defy my most basic logical intuitions, for example. I've learned to interpret ancient, bizarre, abstract Indian philosophy. I've learned to follow Blues dance like nobody's business. And I can't think of a single skill I've gained that simply could not be broken down into quick and easy bug patches, getting-my-mind-around-it-ness, and boatloads of small, consistent efforts.

So maybe I'm wrong, and most of the Wizard skills worth having are primitively slow and difficult to attain. After all, that's one theory that explains why I lack Beisutzukai-level mastery. There's got to be something Anna Salamon and Eliezer Yudkowsky share that I lack, and maybe this is it.

But you know what Anna and Eliezer definitely have that I don't? Practice. Years and years of practice. I heard the word "rationalist" outside of Cartesian philosophy for the first time just two years ago. So maybe while I've had most of the epiphanies I'm going to from Lesswrong's material, and while I've installed most of CFAR's bug patches, there's a third class of easily attainable skills I must gain before I can weave all of it together and become far stronger as a rationalist.

If this is true, it's very good news! It means that if I can looks at the Wizard skills I desire and break them down into the epiphanies and bug patches I already have, I may be able to ask myself, "What part of this puzzle is going to take small, consistent effort?" And I might well come up with a useful answer!

With a single exception, all of the skills I've gained directly from Eliezer since I've lived with him over the past year confirm this hypothesis. (He gave me one all-or-nothing epiphany in person, which was "fail more".) All of the others followed more or less the same pattern:

1. He emphasized the importance of something I already basically had my head around, both abstractly in principle and concretely in practice.
2. I decided to practice CONSTANT VIGILANCE for a single failure mode associated with lack of the skill.
3. I noticed the failure several times over the course of days or weeks until I could predict when I was about to experience the failure mode.
4. I practiced CONSTANT VIGILANCE for times when I could feel that the failure mode was about to happen.
5. I tested out a few ways of responding to the feeling that the failure mode was about to happen, to find out what overcoming the problem might feel like.
6. I let the results of those tests process for a little while.
7. Often, I ran my observations by Eliezer to get his feedback.
8. I composed a trigger-action plan (though usually not in writing) with the trigger "I notice I'm about to experience the failure mode if I don't do anything to stop it", and an action I expect to avert the failure.
9. I practice the trigger-action until it feels like a background habit.
10. I weave my understanding of the problem and its import into my practice.

Imagine a master rationalist does the exercise I described above, picking a Wizard skill and sorting its components into the other quadrants. And imagine she wants to teach that skill to me. She can say some things about what must be understood, hoping to cause the relevant quick but difficult epiphanies. She can give me some simple bug patches to install if quick and easy solutions are part of it. Then, for every slow but easy tortoise component, she could drastically speed up my skill acquisition by providing me with, or otherwise helping me uncover, the following information.

1. What it feels like to notice the failure mode itself, or how to find out what it feels like.
2. What it feels like to notice that the failure mode is about to happen, or some things it might feel like.
3. What to do when I notice that feeling, or a few options for what to try.

A compilation of such advice on tortoises, especially if it were presented in a way that encouraged consistent check-ins and small efforts toward improvement, would be a new kind of rationality resource.

It would not, however, be unprecedented in other domains. Without even doing research, I am aware of books approximating this concept focusing on yoga, mindfulness, writing, and physics. I think we need one of these for the art of rationality.

There's an incredibly important mnemonics exercise that I've somehow neglected to mention to anyone up to this point: Set a five minute timer and write down as many ways as possible for objects to interact with other objects. You might want to work with a particular example, such as "camera" and "watermelon". Or you might want to stick with ways people in particular can interact with things.

In mnemonics, you're constrained by how rigidly your brain insists on completing the usual pattern instead of doing something else. (It occurs to me that you could replace "mnemonics" with just about anything and preserve the truth value of the previous sentence. But it's especially clear-cut in mnemonics.) If you're trying to bind "camera" to "watermelon", it may be that the first thing that comes to mind is "camera takes a picture of the watermelon". It's natural to get stuck on that not-very-memorable image, going round and round with the query "camera watermelon?" and your brain's insistence upon the answer, "camera takes picture of watermelon". You say, "No brain, I need something else," and your brain is all, "Um, but that's what cameras do. How about... camera takes picture of watermelon?"

To reliably escape loops like that, it helps to have practiced the mental motion of trying out other possible interactions, and it helps to have a whole arsenal of them ready to go.

Here, I'll demonstrate. Camera and watermelon. Off the top of my head--really, I'm going to note the very first things that come to mind, like I would in real life:

• Yes, the camera could take a picture of the watermelon, thanks brain, keep thinking. 
• The camera could transform into the watermelon, or melt over it, or deform to surround it, or absorb it, or bounce off of it. (Those count as one because they're my standard, not-really-trying interaction collection.) 
• The water melon could eat the camera. 
• It could tackle the camera. 
• The camera could wrap its strap around the watermelon and strangle it, or make a noose and hang it, or drag it along on a leash. (All things to do with the strap, so that's one.)
• The camera and the watermelon could attempt to have sex, in which case they might spend the whole time looking for some configuration that would allow such a thing to happen despite their apparently incompatible anatomy. 
• The watermelon could be fired out of the barrel of the camera. 
• The watermelon could fall on the camera, crushing it and splattering its guts everywhere. 
• The watermelon and the camera could tango, or waltz, or charleston, or do jumping jacks facing each other, or skip while holding hands, or race. (Those are all physical partner activities, so that's one.) 
• The watermelon could spit seeds at the camera while the camera frantically dodges. 
• The watermelon could vomit the camera. 
• The camera could have a human-shaped body and a super power that lets it shoot watermelons out of its wrists the way Spider Man does with webs. (That was overly complicated, brain, but I appreciate the... whatever it is you just did to make that.)
• The camera could shit the watermelon. 
• The watermelon could give birth to the camera. 
• The watermelon could roll over the camera, squishing it and collecting it up like Katamari Damacy.
• The camera could make out with the watermelon.
• The camera could play tag with the water melon.

Finding things like this is quick and easy once you're used to it. I couldn't type nearly fast enough to get these down as quickly as I thought of them. (To be clear, I'm trying to give you evidence of your own potential, not to show off.) I've been at this long enough that I didn't have to stop for breath to make that list, and it ended because I didn't want to waste your time or use up too many ideas you might have if you tried this exercise. The watermelon would be finding ways to sharpen the camera's mechanical parts into various weapons by the time I was actually done.

It's slow and effortful, though, if you try to do it in real life without having practiced. And it's essential that this become easy for you, if you're after order of magnitude improvements to your internal memory.

Binding is the foundation of all palace-style mnemonics. Once you have a basic two-place relationship that isn't the normal expected thing, you can just feed that to your inner simulator and it'll start filling in all kinds of unexpected, emotionally potent details all on its own as you let the story play out.* With only the expected relationship, you have to make a separate effort to insert every single little detail required to boost the memorability.

There's no way mnemonic techniques will work fast enough to actually be useful if every time you cast out for something besides the usual pattern, your net comes back empty. You'll be stuck with the ordinary, boring, expected pattern. And there's nothing memorable about that.

*Incidentally, the PAO system for number memorization is a systematized application of this principle. "PAO" stands for "Person, Action, Object". To each number between 0 and 99, you assign a person, and action, and an object. Suppose 23 is John Luc Picard sipping a cup of Earl Grey tea, 45 is Captain Jack Harkness fucking a pterodactyl, and 83 is Barney the dinosaur eating a cake. To memorize any six digit number, you have the person from the first two digits do the action from the second two digits to the object in the third two digits. And you end up with "234,583" being encoded as "John Luc Picard fucking a cake". Now when you feed your brain a question like, "What does that sound like?" you don't have to do any extra work to come up with a memorable answer. Your inner simulator has something way outside of any of its usual patterns, and just about anything it could possibly supply for "the sound of Picard fucking a cake" is going to be highly memorable.

[This obviously borrows heavily from the ideas of Eliezer Yudkowsky. In particular, much of it recaps and expands on his talk at the Effective Altruism Retreat of 2014, though I suspect my own ideas fed into that talk anyway. There are also SPOILERS up to chapter 55 of Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.]

I donated to the Humane Society once. There was this charismatic twenty-something holding a clipboard, and I hadn't yet learned to walk past such people on the street. So I stood there and listened, while they told me about lonely puppies raised in tiny, dirty, wire cages; sick and shivering puppies deprived of proper veterinary care, affection, and adequate food and water; frightened puppies, abused and exploited for their market value.

I like puppies. They're fluffy and have great big eyes. They make cute little noises when I play tug of war with them. And it makes me very sad when I imagine them hurting. Clipboard Person told me I could rescue a puppy by donating just ten dollars a month to the Humane Society. So I did. I couldn't help myself.*

The Humane Society of the United States is a nonprofit organization working to reduce animal suffering in the US. The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, another nonprofit, is working to ensure prosperity for the entire future of the humanity. HSUS stops puppy mills and factory farming from hurting animals. MIRI stops artificial general intelligence from destroying the world.**

In 2012, HSUS supporters outdid MIRI supporters one hundred fold in donations.***

Look at this popup.

In this popup--the first thing I see when I visit the HSUS website--I'm told I can be a hero. I'm shown these pink-pawed kissable baby dogs in the arms of their new loving owner [this might actually be a volunteer or police officer or something, whatever], and I'm implicitly led to imagine that if I don't donate, those puppies will suffer and die horribly. If I don't act, terrible things will happen to creatures I automatically care about, and I am personally responsible. This message is concrete, immediate, and heart-wrenching.

Animal advocacy activists have to do approximately zero work to speak to potential donors in the Language of System 1. Which means System 1 automatically gets the message. And guess who's primarily in charge of motivating such actions as pulling out your checkbook. (Hint: It's not System 2.)

This just isn't fair.

I think we can. It takes work. But I think it's possible, and I think I've got some ideas about how to do it. The basic idea is to translate "I should help MIRI" into a message that is similarly concrete, immediate, and heart-wrenching.

So what is the problem, exactly? Why is MIRI so hard for System 1 to understand?

I think the main problem is that the people MIRI's trying to save are difficult to empathize with. If my best friend were dying in front of me and there were a button beside him labeled "save best friend's life", I'd feel motivated to push it even if I had no idea how it worked. But even if I could give S1 an excellent understanding of how MIRI plans to accomplish its goal of saving everyone, it wouldn't change much unless my emotions were behind the goal itself.

VERY IMPORTANT: Do not employ these sorts of methods to get your emotions behind the goal before System 2 is quite certain it's a good idea. Otherwise, you might end up giving all your money to the Humane Society or something. 

Why are most of the people MIRI wants to save so hard to empathize with? I think my lack of empathy is overdetermined.

1. There are too many of them (something on the order of 10^58th), and System 1 can't get a handle on that. No matter how good S2 is at math, S1 thinks huge numbers aren't real, so huge numbers of people aren't real either.
2. Most of them are really far away. Not only are they not right in front of me, but most of them aren't even on my planet, or in my galaxy. S1 is inclined to care only about the people in my immediate vicinity, and when I care about people who are far away, there's generally something else connecting us. S2 thinks this is bollocks, but isn't directly in charge of my emotions.
3. They're also distant in time. Though S2 knows there's no sense in which people of the far distant future are any less real than the people who exist right now, S1 doesn't actually believe in them.
4. They're very strange, and therefore hard to imagine concretely. Day-to-day life will change a lot over time, as it always has. People probably won't even be made of proteins for very much longer. The people I'm trying to empathize with are patterns of computations, and S1 completely fails to register that that's really what people are already. S1 doesn't know how such a thing would look, feel, taste, smell, or sound. It has no satisfying stories to tell itself about them.****
5. I don't imagine myself as living in the future, and S1 is indifferent about things that don't directly involve me. [I feel this so strongly that the first version of 5 said "I don't live in the future," and it took several re-readings before I noticed how ridiculous that was.]

Note that most of these obstacles to S1 understanding apply to world poverty reduction and animal altruism as well. People in the developing world are numerous, distant, and tend to live lives very different from my own. This is true of most animals as well. The population of the far distant future is simply an extreme case.

So those are some S1 weaknesses. But S1 also has strengths to bring to bear on this problem. It's great at feeling empathy and motivation under certain circumstances.

1. S1 can model individuals. It can imagine with solid emotional impact the experience of one single other person.
2. It can handle things that are happening nearby.
3. It can handle things that are happening right now.
4. It feels lots of strong emotions about its "tribe", the people in its natural circle of concern (my family, friends, school, etc.)
5. It cares especially about people with familiar experiences it can easily imagine in vivid sensory detail.
6. It loves stories.
7. It gets a better grip on ideas when things are exaggerated.
8. It's self-centered, in the sense of caring much more about things that involve me directly.

To translate "I should help MIRI" (and relevant associated ideas) into the Language of System 1, you'd need to craft a message that plays to S1's strengths while making up for its weaknesses.

I did this myself, so I'll try to walk you through the process I used.
I started with the central idea and the associated emotion, which I decided is "saving people" or "protecting people". I searched my association network near "saving people" for something concrete I could modify and build on.

I quickly came across "Harry James Potter-Evans-Verris in Azkaban", which is further associated with "patronus", "dementors", and "the woman who cried out for his help when Professor Quirrell's quieting charm was gone". Yes, THERE is the emotion I want to work with. Now I'm getting somewhere.

Now to encode the relevant information in a modification of this story.

In my story, I'm the one walking the halls of Azkaban, rather than Harry. There are too many people in the future, so I'll focus on one person in one cell. And it will be someone close to me, a particular person I know well and care for deeply. One of my best friends.

My version of Azkaban will extend for a few miles in all directions--not far enough to truly represent reality, but just far enough to give me the emotional impression of "really far". The future doesn't feel real, so I'll populate my Azkaban with a bunch of those future people, and my representations of them exist right now in this brick-and-mortar building around me. Some of them are strange in maybe implausible but fairly specific ways--they're aquatic, or silicon crystals, or super-intelligent shades of the color blue, whatever. They're people, and the woman beside me is familiar.

The central message is "save them"--save them from what? From suffering, from death, and from nonexistance. Conveniently, canon dementors already represent those things.

And what's the "patronus"? That's easy too. In my mind, "effective altruism" is the muggle term for "expecto patronum".

Finally, with a broad outline in place, I begin the story and run my simulation in full detail.

I imagine Azkaban. Imagine myself there. A gray prison with cold, damp walls. There are countless cells--I'm not sure how many, but there are at least a dozen in this hall, and a dozen halls on this floor, and a dozen floors in this wing alone. And in every single cell is a person.

There could be animals here, too, if I wanted. Puppies, even. Because this isn't a prison where bad people are sent to be punished and kept from hurting others. This is a much more terrible place, where the innocent go, just for having been born too early, for having lived before anyone knew how to save them from death.

I imagine that I'm walking down the hallway, lined in cells on either side. I hear the eerie clicking of my shoes against the stone floor. Feel the fear of distant dementors washing over me. And as I walk by, on my left, a single person cries out.

I look through the bars, and I can see her. My friend, lying in shadow, whose weak voice I now recognize. She is old and wasting away. She is malnourished, and sickly, and she will die soon. The dementors have fed on her all these years, and she is calling to me with her last breaths. Just as everyone in Azkaban would do if they knew that I'm here, if they knew they were not alone.

I live in a time when things like this still happen to people. To everyone. Some of us live good lives for a while. Others exist always in quiet desperation. But eventually, the dementors become too much for us, and we waste away. It's not pretty. Our bodies fail, our minds fail. We drown in our own phlegm after forgetting the names of our children.

I imagine my friend crying in that cell, wishing to be healthy and happy again, to live one more day. That is just one chosen from every other prisoner in the present and the vast future, who will die if I just watch, doing nothing. Only I can help. I am here, so she is mine to protect. Everyone in Azkaban is mine to protect. They have nobody else. And if I could be everywhere in Azkaban, the cries for help would echo off of every wall.

But it doesn't have to be like this. Azkaban is an evil place, and I do not have to stand for it. Death is not invincible. I can think, and choose my path, and act.

What is Effective Altruism, in the limit? It is healing every wound. Not praying that someone else will do it, but reaching out myself, with everything I have, to destroy every dementor. To tear down these walls. To carry every prisoner to safety, restore them to health, and ensure no one has to suffer and die like this ever again.

It is seeing this one suffering woman who needs my help and choosing to protect her from the darkness--and knowing that she is every person in the future extended before me.

Harry cast his protronus to protect the woman, in the original story. But then he stopped. Because it wasn't time. He didn't have the power. Like the altruists of two hundred years ago, he wasn't ready. There was only so much he could do.

But now the time has come. Today is the pivotal moment in all of human history when I have the power to intervene effectively. I can cast my patronus, and never let it stop until every dementor is destroyed, and every person has been protected.

A dementor approaches from one end of the hall, seeking its prey. I feel it, radiating emptiness and despair, and a woman wimpers, "help me, please".  From the other end of the hall, others who share my goals race in to help me me. They gather before the dementor. Leaders of EA organizations, others who have dedicated their lives to existential risk reduction. They draw their wands and prepare for battle.

I look at my friend in her cell, her eyes pleading desperately, as I draw my wand and move into the beginning stance for the patronus charm. "I will save you," I say to her.

Moving my thumb and forefinger just the right distance apart, I imagine her smiling, revived, prospering.

I flick my wand once, and promise she will be free. Twice, and promise to free all the prisoners in this wing. Thrice, and promise to free every prisoner in Azkaban. Four times, and promise no dementor will hurt another living person ever again.

We level our wands straight at the dementor, brandishing them to drive away the darkness. And with victory in our voices, together we shout,

"EFFECTIVE ALTRUISM!"

The thought explodes from my wand, blazing with the brilliance of the MOST good. It joins with the patronuses of all the other effective altruists. The light burns down the hallway, freeing every prisoner it passes from despair and death. It burns through the walls, and they crumble. It burns in every direction, and one after another, the dementors are reduced to little piles of ashen cloth. Healing the wounds in the world. The light continues to grow, enveloping the patch of pebbles that once was Azkaban, our whole world, our galaxy, our future light cone.

Saving our people. Everyone. Everywhere. Forever.
"Effective altruism" is the muggle term for "expecto patronum". It needn't be merely an abstract idea we force ourselves to act on while our emotions lag behind. It can be our battle cry against death.

*I'd never heard of effective altruism then, of course. In fact, I didn't consider myself an altruist of any sort. I'm not sure I'd donated to anything at that point besides maybe SETI. The HSUS pitch was just really good.
**"Converting the reachable universe into quality adjusted life years is also cute." --Eliezer Yudkowsky, Effective Altruism Summit 2013
***In their 990s, HSUS reported $112,833,027 in grants and contributions, while MIRI reported $1,066,055.
****The Tale of the Far Future Person: "Once upon a time, there will have been an entity. The entity will have been alive and sentient. It will have had various experiences and values. Never dying, it will have satisfied its preferences ever after. The end."

Be it known: I have renamed this blog, and it shall henceforth be found at agentyduck.blogspot.com, starting August 1st, 2014. Please update your various things that need updating accordingly.

I used to be afraid of checking the balance of my bank account. I felt as though finding out how much money I had caused me to lose money, so I'd go weeks, sometimes a month, without checking it--even though my income was tiny and irregular. I'd feel guilty almost any time I bought anything, which led to bizarre spending patterns where I'd go for a while eating nothing but rice and beans, then suddenly spend way too much because hey, if I'm doomed anyway for having bought this one unnecessary thing, I might as well enjoy myself before reality catches up with me.

Not surprisingly, when I finally got around to checking my  balance, it was usually frighteningly low. Which, of course, my brain took as punishment for checking my balance, and the cycle continued.

I finally confronted this a little less than a year ago. Though it hurt a lot to poke at the problem, I reasoned like this: In reality, checking my balance causes me to gain money. Nobody's paying me directly for logging into my account, but having accurate beliefs about the resources available to me allows for far more efficient, and not completely insane, spending patterns, and therefore a higher balance on average. Additionally, it's really dangerous in general to allow myself to cling to false beliefs, regardless of how comforting they may be. (This was probably inspired by Anna explaining that paying parking tickets on time is equivalent to cashing a check in the amount of a late fee.)

But understanding this in an abstract, System 2 way was nowhere near enough. It didn't actually change my behavior at all, because on an emotional level, I remained strongly motivated to avoid checking my bank account. The important work done by reasoning through things was to recognize that I really did care about having money and not lying to myself, and that checking my account balance would lead to those larger goals.

Inspired by techniques I learned in a CFAR workshop, I knew that my next step was to explain to System 1 why checking my bank account leads to something I really want. After caching that snapshot message in memory, I'd be able to invoke my System 1-optimized explanation every time I noticed "this would be a good time to check my bank account" and felt myself trying to bury the thought.

Before me (where "me" is usually played by Duncan MacLeod of the TV series Highlander), I'd imagine an ominous looking lock on a Gringotts style bank vault. A broadsword is strapped across my back. The lock represents "clinging to comforting beliefs about my finances", and it stands between me and all the riches behind that door.

Focusing on the feeling of wanting to remain ignorant, of wanting to pretend everything is ok regardless of the truth, I draw my sword. I prepare to strike, raising the sword, calling to mind relinquishment: "That which can be destroyed by the truth should be... the thought I cannot think controls me more than thoughts I speak aloud." Remembering how it feels to let go of ignorance, I let the sword fall, slashing right through the lock. It drops, broken, to the stone floor, making an amplified echo of the "click" from the enter key of my keyboard as it clatters across the ground. Slowly, the door begins to open.

In the mean time, having taken the head of my enemy, the Highlander quickening begins. (I'm MacLeod, remember?) The quickening is, well...


Some background: In Highlander, an "immortal" can kill another immortal by cutting off his head. When that happens, all the knowledge and power of the dead immortal is transferred to the victorious immortal. The transfer is called a "quickening", and it basically looks like a giant lightning storm focused on the winner.

Anyway, knowledge is power, so this knowledge storm thing happens while the vault door opens. When it's all over, I enter the vault to look upon my horde of gold pieces and jewels so sparkly they would make a dragon jealous.

If that seems a whole lot more intricate and over the top than you'd expect me to need for something as simple as "check my account balance", you've got to remember I was trying to blast through this almighty ugh field that had crippled me for years. Usually, going straight for this System 1 translation technique isn't recommended when there's a solid ugh field in the way, since there are other techniques (like aversion factoring) you can use to break those down a little at a time. But I've found that it often works just fine as long as your translation is solid and your message is even stronger than the ugh field. Powerful ugh field, powerful message. Subject doesn't really matter. Plus, the basic idea of the quickening ended up serving perfectly as a general purpose translation for relinquishment itself later on.

And... it totally worked! I checked my balance multiple times a week, and experienced no more pain than my actual financial situation warranted. I ended up with accurate beliefs about how much I'd spent and how much I had left.

Moreover, here's what prompted me to make this post: I just checked my balance, and for the third or fourth time in a row, I was surprised to find more money there than I expected. I think this is because I'm so used to discovering I've drastically overestimated my balance that the new urge to know my real balance causes me to update right away to something resembling what the truth should be given past experience. But my spending patterns have improved, as predicted, so now I really do have more cash in my account on average than my past experiences predict!

I certainly haven't amassed vast piles of gold, but System 1 isn't so great with quantities anyway, and it understands "room full of shiny things I can exchange for chocolate" much better than "large percent increase in available funds".

Doublethink

It is obvious that the same thing will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same part of itself, in relation to the same thing, at the same time.

Can you simultaneously want sex and not want it? Can you believe in God and not believe in Him at the same time? Can you be fearless while frightened?

To be fair to Plato, this was meant not as an assertion that such contradictions are impossible, but as an argument that the soul has multiple parts. It seems we can, in fact, want something while also not wanting it. This is awfully strange, and it led Plato to conclude the soul must have multiple parts, for surely no one part could contain both sides of the contradiction.

Often, when we attempt to accept contradictory statements as correct, it causes cognitive dissonance--that nagging, itchy feeling in your brain that won't leave you alone until you admit that something is wrong. Like when you try to convince yourself that staying up just a little longer playing 2048 won't have adverse effects on the presentation you're giving tomorrow, when you know full well that's exactly what's going to happen.

But it may be that cognitive dissonance is the exception in the face of contradictions, rather than the rule. How would you know? If it doesn't cause any emotional friction, the two propositions will just sit quietly together in your brain, never mentioning that it's logically impossible for both of them to be true. When we accept a contradiction wholesale without cognitive dissonance, it's what Orwell called "doublethink".

When you're a mere mortal trying to get by in a complex universe, doublethink may be adaptive. If you want to be completely free of contradictory beliefs without spending your whole life alone in a cave, you'll likely waste a lot of your precious time working through conundrums, which will often produce even more conundrums.

Suppose I believe that my husband is faithful, and I also believe that the unfamiliar perfume on his collar indicates he's sleeping with other women without my permission. I could let that pesky little contradiction turn into an extended investigation that may ultimately ruin my marriage. Or I could get on with my day and leave my marriage in tact.

It's better to just leave those kinds of thoughts alone, isn't it? It probably makes for a happier life.

Against Doublethink

Against Against Doublethink

I read Atlas Shrugged probably about a decade ago. I was impressed with its defense of capitalism, which really hammers home the reasons it’s good and important on a gut level. But I was equally turned off by its promotion of selfishness as a moral ideal. I thought that was *basically* just being a jerk. After all, if there’s one thing the world doesn’t need (I thought) it’s more selfishness.

Then I talked to a friend who told me Atlas Shrugged had changed his life. That he’d been raised in a really strict family that had told him that ever enjoying himself was selfish and made him a bad person, that he had to be working at every moment to make his family and other people happy or else let them shame him to pieces. And the revelation that it was sometimes okay to consider your own happiness gave him the strength to stand up to them and turn his life around, while still keeping the basic human instinct of helping others when he wanted to and he felt they deserved it (as, indeed, do Rand characters). --Scott of Slate Star Codex in All Debates Are Bravery Debates

If you're generous to a fault, "I should be more selfish" is probably a belief that will pay off in positive outcomes should you install it for future use. If you're selfish to a fault, the same belief will be harmful. So what if you were too generous half of the time and too selfish the other half? Well, then you would want to believe "I should be more selfish" with only the generous half, while disbelieving it with the selfish half.

Systems 1 and 2 need to hear different things. System 2 might be able to understand the reality of biases and make appropriate adjustments that would work if System 1 were on board, but System 1 isn't so great at being reasonable. And it's not System 2 that's in charge of most of your actions. If you want your beliefs to positively influence your actions (which is the point of beliefs, after all), you need to tailor your beliefs to System 1's needs.

For example: The planning fallacy is nearly ubiquitous. I know this because for the past three years or so, I've gotten everywhere five to fifteen minutes early. Almost every single person I meet with arrives five to fifteen minutes late. It is very rare for someone to be on time, and only twice in three years have I encountered the (rather awkward) circumstance of meeting with someone who also arrived early.

Before three years ago, I was also usually late, and I far underestimated how long my projects would take. I knew, abstractly and intellectually, about the planning fallacy, but that didn't stop System 1 from thinking things would go implausibly quickly. System 1's just optimistic like that. It responds to, "Dude, that is not going to work, and I have a twelve point argument supporting my position and suggesting alternative plans," with "Naaaaw, it'll be fine! We can totally make that deadline."

At some point (I don't remember when or exactly how), I gained the ability to look at the true due date, shift my System 1 beliefs to make up for the planning fallacy, and then hide my memory that I'd ever seen the original due date. I would see that my flight left at 2:30, and be surprised to discover on travel day that I was not late for my 2:00 flight, but a little early for my 2:30 one. I consistently finished projects on time, and only disasters caused me to be late for meetings. It took me about three months before I noticed the pattern and realized what must be going on.

I got a little worried I might make a mistake, such as leaving a meeting thinking the other person just wasn't going to show when the actual meeting time hadn't arrived. I did have a couple close calls along those lines. But it was easy enough to fix; in important cases, I started receiving Boomeranged notes from past-me around the time present-me expected things to start that said, "Surprise! You've still got ten minutes!"

This unquestionably improved my life. You don't realize just how inconvenient the planning fallacy is until you've left it behind. Clearly, considered in isolation, the action of believing falsely in this domain was instrumentally rational.

Doublethink, and the "Dark Arts" generally, applied to carefully chosen domains is a powerful tool. It's dumb to believe false things about really dangerous stuff like driving, obviously. But you don't have to doublethink indiscriminately. As long as you're careful, as long as you suspend epistemic rationality only when it's clearly beneficial to do so, employing doublethink at will is a great idea.

Instrumental rationality is what really matters. Epistemic rationality is useful, but what use is holding accurate beliefs in situations where that won't get you what you want?

Against Against Against Doublethink

One of the upsides is that I can read books several times and be surprised by each plot twist again and again. I usually feel a sort of comfortable familiarity when I re-read a book, but that is very often the closest thing to a memory of past readings I retrieve. An effect of that particular phenomenon is that I sometimes completely forget major intellectual influences, and really have no idea how I came to think the way that I do. But I read constantly as a child and teenager, so I know the majority of it has come from books.

For the past few days I've been reading a familiar-seeming Star Trek book called Spock's World, by Diane Duane. I was not completely certain until today that I had in fact read it before.

I was sort of stunned by a particular passage and wanted to share it, because it seems to encompass--and, given I must have read it as a teenager, foreshadow--so much of what's been going on in my life recently. Though this isn't canon, the Vulcans really are rationalists in at least some versions of the Trek universe. I think adopting the term discussed may make my daily life slightly more efficient and meaningful.

[Spoilers: I give away some of the plot of Spock's World below. But honestly, it's not exactly a plot-driven novel, so I wouldn't worry too much.]

Background: Vulcan is considering withdrawing from the Federation, and Sarek, Spock's father and Vulcan's ambassador to Earth, has been called back by T'pau to speak in favor of withdrawing. At this point, he has relatively little information about T'pau's motives and reasoning, so he's not decided whether to oblige her or to resign and be exiled. Upon meeting with members of the Enterprise, the following conversation ensues. [Emphasis mine.]

"This I will say to you Captain: I find being forced to speak against the planet of my embassage immensely distasteful, for reasons that have nothing to do with my history there, my marriage, or my relationships with my son and Starfleet. My whole business for many years has been to understand your peoples and to come closer to them; to understand their diversities. Now I find that business being turned on its ear, and all the knowledge and experience I have amassed being called on to drive away that other diversity, to isolate my people from it. It is almost a perversion of what my career has stood for." 

"But if you feel you have to do it," McCoy said softly, "You'll do it anyway." 

"Of course I will, Doctor. Here, as at many other times, the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few. What if, as the next few days progress, I become certain that my own people would be more damaged by remaining within the Federation than by leaving it? Must I not then preserve the species of which I am part? But the important thing is that this matter be managed with logic." He blinked then, and spoke again, so that a word came out that did not translate. "No. Cthia. I must not be misunderstood. Cthia must rule this, or we are all lost." 

Jim looked puzzled. "I think I need a translation. It's obviously a Vulcan word, but I'm not familiar with it." 

Amanda [Sarek's wife] looked sad. "This is possibly the worst aspect of this whole mess," she said. "It's the modern Vulcan word which we translate as 'logic'. But what it more correctly means is 'reality-truth'. The truth about the universe, the way things really are, rather than the way we would like them to be. It embraces the physical and the inner realities both at once, in all their changes. The concept says that if we do not tell the universe the truth about itself, if we don't treat it and the people in it as what they are--real, and precious--it will turn against us, and none of our affairs will prosper." She sighed. "That's a child's explanation of the word, I'm afraid. Whole books have been written trying to define it completely. What Sarek is saying is that if we don't handle this matter with the utmost respect for the truth, for what is really needed by everyone involved in it, it will end in disaster." 

"And the problem," McCoy said softly, "is that the truth about what's needed looks different to everybody who faces the situation..." 

Sarek nodded once, a grave gesture. "If I find that I must defend the planet of my birth by turning against my many years on Earth, then I will do so. Alternately," he said, "if I can in good faith defend the Federation in my testimony, I will do that. But what matters is that cthia be observed, without fail, without flaw. Otherwise, all this is useless."

I've been thinking about Eliezer's suggestion to "Leave a Line of Retreat". The gist is this: Scary possibilities can be hard to think about, but it's easier to consider evidence for and against them once you know how you'd respond if the scary thing turned out to be true. In his words:

The prospect of losing your job, say, may seem a lot more scary when you can't even bear to think about it, than after you have calculated exactly how long your savings will last, and checked the job market in your area, and otherwise planned out exactly what to do next. Only then will you be ready to fairly assess the probability of keeping your job in the planned layoffs next month. Be a true coward, and plan out your retreat in detail—visualize every step—preferably before you first come to the battlefield.

Maybe we should practice finding lines of retreat in random situations occasionally. Then when we go to do it in a situation where we might actually need to retreat, our brains will be less likely to go, "Hey now, I see what you're up to." Suppose that every time you consider the question, "What would I do if the scary thing were true?" you end up facing the scary thing for real immediately afterward. Then you're classically conditioning yourself to not look for a line of retreat.

For example, I walked into an ice cream shop today*, and before entering I was already considering which flavor to get (which for me means weighing all the alternatives against chocolate). Because I happened to recognize the opportunity, I practiced leaving a line of retreat by asking, "Oh no, what if they don't have chocolate?" and answering, "Well, I'll either get vanilla instead, or I'll go to a different ice cream shop." Then I ordered chocolate.

Unlike in most cases where it's important to apply this skill, there was no reason to suspect they wouldn't have chocolate in the first place. So instead of applying the technique and then experiencing the punishment of actually settling for vanilla, from a classical conditioning perspective, I was immediately rewarded for my practice session with chocolate ice cream.

It's great to recognize a difficult rationality technique as wise, virtuous, and resulting in positive outcomes in the long run. But on the level of moment-to-moment decisions, my actual behaviors are much more strongly driven by chocolate than wisdom. Ideally, I'd also be driven by chocolate to be rational, right?

*This is a lie. What I actually walked into was a parable.

Two days ago, I experienced a flash of social anxiety, which is something that hasn't happened in months.

I was trying to better understand odds and why they're better than probabilities for Bayesian reasoning, and I was writing with a marker on large sheets of paper. Then Eliezer came home and opened the door right behind me, and I panicked. I think System 1 doesn't want him to know that I struggle sometimes with really basic math in addition to provability theory and topology; it doesn't look impressive to re-learn how to translate between odds and probabilities. So I felt this huge spike of embarrassment (which used to be so familiar) and quickly hid my work.

Last night at a party, I noticed myself fearing that panic from before, and imagining the anxiety made me anxious. It was mildly discouraging. I notice now that I tried to hide from that.

If my freedom from social anxiety depends on nothing ever going wrong with that part of my brain, it'll be extremely fragile, and I don't want that. Alternately, it could depend on my ability to ignore or rationalize problems when they do happen.

Although I clearly have that ability, I think I don't want to exercise it. I want to learn to stare into frightening problems and discern the truth about them so I can bring all my powers to bear on solving them once certainly understood. I want all of me to believe true things about my challenges, and I'm confident that if I can meet them with self deception, I can meet them at least as well without it.

A couple months ago I'd not have written this post, because I'm explicitly acknowledging a fact that I fear may indicate a sudden and complete slide back into constant anxiety. It sounds dangerous for self-fulfilling-prophesy reasons. But I know that if I lied to myself, that slide wouldn't happen. I believe that if I believe that I won't relapse, then I won't relapse, so by Lob's theorem, I believe that I won't relapse. So, in full knowledge of having been anxious, I now declare it an isolated event.

Will I triumph, or will this happen with increasing frequency until I return to my previous state of constant crippling fear? Place your bets!

P(free of anxiety in 1 month)

P(free of anxiety in 4 months|free in 1 month)

P(free of anxiety in 4 months)

Don't refrain from betting against me because you're afraid it will discourage me and affect the outcome. The whole point is to demonstrate that I can direct my self-modification by embracing the truth.

Recently, my friend Malcolm was carrying very heavy bags of groceries home from the store, and taking much longer than he wanted to. He kept pausing to set them down, and at one point thought, "I can't do this". Then he asked himself, "If someone was going to reward me with a million dollars if I could get home in 8 minutes with all of these groceries intact, would I be able to do it?” and the answer was, "Um, duh, yes."

Then a brilliant thing happened.

He thought, "If someone was going to reward me with the abstract knowledge that I’m able to motivate myself to do really hard things using only hypothetical rewards, would I be able to do it?” After that, he kept up his usual light-grocery-load pace all the way home, and made it there in 6 minutes.

Notice the wording of that. I'll modify it a bit to make my point.

If I do this, I will have justified belief that I can motivate myself to do really hard things using only hypothetical rewards, which itself counts as a hypothetical reward. I've seen people do amazing things via Löbian reasoning in the past, so I'm about 80% confident it'll work. Now I shall test this hypothesis.

Notice what he didn't say. He didn't say, "Am I the kind of person who can do this?" and then lie to himself in the hopes of becoming that kind of person. Nor did he say, "Do I want to be the kind of person who can do this?"

No part of you needs to believe false things--or even exaggerated truths--about personal identity to make stuff like this work when you have timeless decision theory. You can just believe true things about your brain and mammalian behavioral psychology and manipulate the world accordingly.

Scientia potentia est.

Further Resources

I recently gained an extremely useful social concept that I'd like to propagate. It's called "cuddle orientation".

Different people experience cuddling differently. Some people love to be held, pet, and massaged by others. They're most satisfied with cuddling while taking on the more passive role. These are "cuddle bottoms" (analogous to the BDSM "bottom" orientation). Some people love to hold, pet, and massage others, and they're most satisfied with cuddling when they're doing the active part. These are "cuddle tops". As with sexual orientation, most people probably fall somewhere in the middle. There are likely a lot of true "cuddle switches" who are equally fulfilled by the active and receptive roles, but I expect people cluster toward the poles.

[The following description of my pre-cuddle-revelation experiences should be taken as System 1 attitudes. These phenomena never made it to System 2 consideration, so please don't think I thought hard about it and then went on believing dumb things.]

I am very strongly a cuddle bottom. For a long time, I was not aware of the existence of cuddle tops. I typical minded so hard that I assumed everyone played the active roll for one of three reasons. Either they're counting on reciprocity to bring them passive cuddles in the future, they feel socially obligated to do their time as the active cuddler, or they're just really nice people who tend to prioritize others' pleasure before their own.

I never once took seriously the hypothesis that they might derive pleasure directly from cuddle topping. Given my immersion in BDSM culture, this was a pretty silly mistake. I should have known better.

It was also a costly mistake. I developed an aversion to cuddle puddles, because the more I let myself enjoy being held, pet, and massaged, the more completely I felt I'd bought into an implicit promise to be an active cuddler later. I thought I was building up cuddle debt. I also thought I was costing the other person/people hedons while they waited for their turn. I find this kind of social pressure very painful, so despite my love of being cuddled, I consistently turned down cuddle invitations. (Incidentally, I went through an "I'd really rather not bother with sex" period for exactly the same reason before learning that I'm sexually submissive and that dominants exist.)

When discussing this with a friend recently, I learned that cuddle tops can experience something similar. What he really wants is to keep doing the active cuddling, but he's constantly worried that the other person wants him to stop or isn't enjoying it any time they're not giving very clear "I like this, please keep doing it" signals. And I, for one, am not especially vocal when I'm completely relaxed.

But now that we know these things about each other, cuddling together will be awesome. I'll be completely guilt free and able to relax into the experience, and he'll know that this is exactly what I want. Furthermore, we've set a precedent for open communication on this topic, so if either of us wants to change anything in the moment, we'll be comfortable saying so.

You don't have to guess at this stuff. Don't behave as though we're all expected to read minds. Know yourself, volunteer that knowledge when it's useful, and ask questions when you want to learn about others.

Here's what I want everybody to do, especially if you're in one of my social circles where casual cuddling happens a lot. Figure out your cuddle orientation. Maybe you're a-cuddley (not really into cuddles), maybe you're a top or a bottom, maybe you always want to give and receive simultaneously (don't know what to call that, but I know it exists), or maybe you're a cuddle switch who's happy whenever any sort of cuddling happens.

Then establish a norm of briefly negotiating your cuddle puddle beforehand. If cuddling looks like it's starting--or if you'd like it to start--just say, "I'm a cuddle top. Would anybody like to be cuddled by me?" and then "Bottom, switch, or what?" if they haven't already told you.

This isn't any more difficult than asking for permission before touching someone, which is already an established practice (at least among my friends). It's also an excellent time to find out who likes what kind of touch. Very light caresses in the same area set me on edge after less than a minute, for instance, while deeper pressure and scratching make me melt.

If there are two bottoms, two tops, and three switches, some cuddle puddle configurations will lead to much greater satisfaction than others. The tops might focus on each other, which wouldn't be much fun at all. But even when the complementary roles happen to pair up nicely, common knowledge of cuddle preferences leads to less anxiety, faster and clearer feedback, and therefore much more efficient cuddles.

I recently realized my meditation practice has grown very irregular and infrequent. For a while this was due mainly to instability; I was moving around a lot so my schedule was chaotic. (All the more reason to meditate, but I'm naming causes, not justifications.) But my life hasn't been like that for a few
months now, yet I haven't reestablished my practice. I thought about it, and I discovered another reason.

I learned to meditate at a Zen temple where my primary official role was doan: the person in charge of the bells. But I was actually in charge of all of the ritual things that weren't strictly the priest's prerogative, so all of that goes hand in hand with meditation for me. Zazen just doesn't feel right if
there's no incense, chimes, candles, flowers, chanting, or altar. I didn't do anything about this for a long time because it felt really silly, which  is a completely stupid reason to not do something. Classical conditioning is a thing. If a specific atmosphere or series of behaviors puts me quickly into the frame of mind I'm after due to past immersion and repetition, then I have a cheat code that many others would pay thousands of dollars for (as evidenced by retreat and workshop prices at monasteries).

So now I have a zafu, traditional Japanese incense, a candle, and I've just ordered a chime. Most importantly, I have a room for nothing but zazen. But having a Buddha statue still feels really weird to me.

It felt even more so the first time around, especially when I was expected to bow to the thing constantly, but over time it became important as a symbol of why I was doing what I was doing. The statue we used was Kannon, not Gautama. Kannon is a Bodhisattva, an Eastern evolution of Avalokiteśvara, who vowed to put off final enlightenment until all sentient beings were saved from suffering. She is not actually a Buddha yet, and in Mahayana sects like Zen, practitioners walk the Bodhisattva path rather than seeking Buddhahood directly.

My altar feels empty and my practice undirected without a symbol of why I'm doing what I'm doing. But although Kannon seems close to right, I also feel like she symbolizes the misconception that it's possible to save the world merely by meditating, cultivating compassion, and acting compassionately on a small scale; and also the misconception that we have eons to get it right.

So how might an effectively altruistic atheist, whose meditation practice is the foundation of her art of rationality, symbolize her mission?

Oh my gosh, I just learned this amazing thing.

Suppose I've had an argument with Ted. If it didn't go well or hasn't been resolved, I likely have this annoying pinging in my head that involves worry about how Ted feels about me, and worry that he believes false things about me. The worry is potentially productive, and is directed toward causing Ted to believe true things or to feel about me the way I prefer.

But other people's minds are really hard to control compared to my own mind. So before I reach out to change more distant parts of the world, I should say to myself, "Suppose Ted really does feel or believe exactly what you fear he does. Further, suppose it turns out that no matter what you do, you can't change his mind. How would you like to feel about how he feels about you?"

!!!

I've done similar things in the non-social realm (this feels close to "give yourself an escape route" and "bad news is good news"), but somehow I've never applied it to interpersonal conflict.

Mind. Blown.

Here's an idea for a school I've never heard of before.

The best math professors assign problem sets such that solving problem n requires you learn skills needed to solve problem n+1. I think this is obviously the best way to learn math. In my experience, the vast majority of things worth learning are best learned in this way as well.

Suppose you took on a problem set that looks something like this:

1. Trade shoes with a stranger.
2. Cause a mariachi band to play at the corner of First and Main at 4PM on Saturday.
3. Cause a group of at least five strangers to cross the street together while skipping.
4. Cause at least twenty people in a mall foodcourt to dance the macarena together.
5. Build a pillow fort the size of a basketball court in Central Park (without using money).
6. Cause a silent rave to happen at all 12 Big Ten universities simultaneously.

The above problem set isolates "coordination of arbitrary groups of humans". Related skill sets are "fundraising", "meme propagation", and "bureaucratic navigation". Problem 6 almost certainly requiers medium-level delegation, but you'd probably want an entire problem set just for delegation. Once you've got all of those, you've unlocked problems like "run a successful political campaign".

I've been thinking about how to transfer apparent superpowers from one person to another. I'm pretty sure this is the correct approach. I'm also envisioning a pretty kick-ass domain general leveling-up training program.

Gender schemas are largely non-conscious hypotheses we all have about the different characteristics of males and females. We see females as nurturing, as communal, and as doing things out of concern for other people. And we see males as capable of independent action, doing things for a reason, and getting down to the business at hand. [The male gender schema includes negations of the female gender schema and vice verse.] We have schemas about everything, every social group defined by race, age, sex, social class, and roles. So students have schemas about what it is to be a professor. And people have schemas about what it is to be a scientist. And for most professions, the schema that people have for being a professional person overlaps much more with the schema for being male than it does with the schema for being female. So we take requirements to be successful for most fields as being capable of independent action, doing things for a reason, and getting down to the business at hand.

-  Virginia Valian in an address to Chairs and Senior Administrators at the City University of New York

Our beliefs about the relative rationality of men and women are importantly problematic regardless of whether our beliefs about men and women in general are by and large correct.

Suppose that a random male raised by gender-blind robots who pass the Turing test is, on average, significantly less likely to end up more nurturing, communal, and likely to do things out of concern for other people than is a female raised under similar circumstances. And suppose both sexes vary greatly along those dimensions, such that men who are innately at least as nurturing etc. as the average woman are fairly common. When you meet a new person, your use some model of them to predict their behavior, and that model has only your prior beliefs about people with the characteristics you immediately observe, such as their appearing male or female.

If your priors are in favor of men in general being non-nurturing (and they're accurate on average), your implicit model of any specific randomly chosen man will also predict that he is non-nurturing. It will take extra evidence for you to update to expecting the man to be nurturing. So at this point, you're already going to end up with a gender imbalance in professions that require the characteristics of female gender schemata, such as teaching kindergarten, social work, and nursing.

If the vast majority of professions require the characteristics of the female gender role, then even given only the things I've mentioned so far, you're going to end up with at least a mild case of women ruling the world and men being second-class citizens.

Now suppose people are actually not so great at Bayesian updating--their beliefs have huge amounts of inertia due to confirmation bias and related phenomena. If your (implicit, unconscious) priors have grown to be strongly in favor of men being non-nurturing, non-communal, and doing things out of self-interest rather than a concern for other people, then any given man will have to exhibit the characteristics of the female gender schema much more overtly than a random woman before you believe that he is in fact nurturing etc. Due to cognitive biases we already know about, a slight gender imbalance in innate tendency to exhibit the nurturing etc. characteristics required by the vast majority of professions could easily lead to an overwhelming, horribly oppressive case of women ruling the world and men being second-class citizens. If you add to that a long history of people in power liking power and wanting to keep it and have more of it, this scenario is even bleaker.

In reality, this is exactly what the world looks like, except that the vast majority of professions require the characteristics of male gender schemata instead--most professionals benefit from being seen as agenty, having reasons for their actions, and working efficiently. There are some exceptions: Grade school teachers, social workers, and nurses benefit from being seen as nurturing, communal, and doing things out of concern for other people.
But so far the model I've described only obviously explains things we've already observed. Does it make risky testable predictions as well?

You bet!

For one thing, it predicts the following of people working in a profession that emphasizes characteristics of the male gender schema. Suppose you hand people equal evidence of the professional competence of two candidates. Then you tell them that one is a bio of a male, and the other the bio of a female. The model I've described predicts that the man will be rated as more highly competent. Why? Because the raters will need to encounter more evidence of professional competence for the female to overcome the rater's priors against her. If this doesn't happen in real life, it's strong evidence against my model.

Furthermore, it doesn't predict that men and women would differ in their ratings of the candidates. A difference would be evidence against my model. Competing hypotheses--anything along the lines of "gender inequality happens because men dislike women more than women dislike men"--do predict that the ratings should differ according to the sex and gender of the raters.
In 1995, the ratio of admitted/rejected male applicants for postdoctoral fellowships at a certain medical school was twice that of female applicants. Wennerås and Wold investigated. They came up with a system for determining the "impact points" of professional academics. The points were awarded according to number of journal publications, prestige of the respective journals, number of articles in which zer name is listed first among the authors, and number of citations zer article received in a one-year period. They then used this system to determine the impact on their field of applicants for postdoctoral fellowships to a certain medical school in Sweden.

Ordinarily, the results of admissions reviews are not made public. Due to an unusual court case, the committee reviews for this particular round of medical students were, and the reviews included an overall "competence rating". From their article in Nature:

Did men and women with equal scientific productivity receive the same competence rating by the MRC reviewers? No! ... The peer reviewers gave female applicants lower scores than male applicants who displayed the same level of scientific productivity. In fact, the most productive group of female applicants, containing those with 100 total impact points or more, was the only group of women judged to be as competent as men, although only as competent as the least productive group of male applicants (the one whose members had fewer than 20 total impact points).

Wennerås and Wold controlled for the applicant's nationality, education, field, university affiliation, evaluation committee to which the applicant was assigned, postdoctoral experience abroad, letter of recommendation, and affiliation with members of the evaluation committee. Perceived gender continued to matter. Lots.

According to the multiple-regression model based on total impact, female applicants started from a basic competence level of 2.09 competence points (the intercept of the multiple regression curve) and were given an extra 0.0033 competence points by the reviewers for every impact point they had accumulated. Independent of scientific productivity, however, male applicants received an extra 0.21 points for competence. So, for a female scientist to be awarded the same competence as a male colleague, she needed to exceed his scientific productivity by 64 impact points (95 per cent confidence interval: 35-93 impact points). 

So how much work does that amount to?

This represents approximately three extra papers in Nature or Science (impact factors 25 and 22, respectively), or 20 extra papers in a journal with an impact factor of around 3, which would be an excellent specialist journal such as Atherosclerosis, Gut, Infection and Immunity, Neuroscience or Radiology. Considering that the mean total impact of this cohort of applicants was 40 points, a female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score as he ((40+64)/40=2.6). [Emphasis mine.]

Let me repeat that. A female applicant had to be 2.5 times more productive than the average male applicant to receive the same competence score.

Sandstrom and Hallsten replicated this study in 2008.

There were not enough women on the review committees (5 out of 55 in 1995) to determine whether women equally favored male candidates. There are plenty of other studies, however, demonstrating that there's no significant difference between men and women in how they rate other men and women. Both genders and sexes seem to be equally subject to gender bias. Example: A study by Norton, Vandello, and Darley on how we rationalize favoring men.

There are at least two things this question might mean. The easy version has an answer along these lines: Hypnosis is a tendency to comply with suggestions more than whatever your base rate is. Additionally, it's characterized by cataleptic and amnesic effects, as well as selective attention and reduced sensitivity to pain. Let's call this set of behaviors "hypnosis syndrome".

The other interpretation of "what is hypnosis" is "why does hypnosis syndrome happen?". I don't know the answer to that one. But here are what thoughts I do have in the direction of an answer.

I don't think there's any one thing going on with hypnosis. There is no button in your brain the hypnotist pushes to cause Sudden Asleepening. I certainly don't mean to say that there's no such thing as hypnosis. But looking for an individual mechanism causing all of its features is like studying biology by searching for the source of elan vital.

Ordinary Trance

Here are some ordinary kinds of experiences from everyday life that I think hypnotists have probably figured out how to replicate at will and take advantage of.
 
1. Suggestion: If you're cognitively taxed and experiencing a lot of dissonance, it can be an incredible relief when someone else takes over.

You just had a very long day full of important business decisions. You're having dinner at a restaurant, and you can't decide what to order off the very long menu. "Just have the turkey," says your spouse, and that's what you have. They make your decision for you, and you're happy to comply without thinking deliberatively about it any further.

It doesn't feel at all like they forced you to order the turkey. Still, they suggested you order the turkey, and you ordered it. That's complying with suggestion. You're more likely to comply with that particular suggestion when your feeling of indecision is slightly unpleasant or draining, so it's safe to say that you're in a state of heightened suggestibility when faced with a cognitively taxing dinner menu.

2. Selective attention: You never experience every element of your surroundings with equal attention. Sometimes, your attention becomes so selective that you're completely unaware of large portions of your perceptible environment.

You're in a state of flow. You're working on something you're passionate about, but it's very challenging, so you're highly focused. (Maybe you're composing music, proving a mathematical theorem, or practicing three-pointers.) Someone is standing right beside you trying to get your attention, even saying your name. Yet, when they finally touch your shoulder, you jump a bit from how surprised you are to discover them.

It's not that the sound of their voice didn't enter your ears, or that the light reflecting off of them didn't enter your eyes. Your attention was just too narrowly directed to respond to stimuli irrelevant to the object of your intense focus.

3. Catalepsy: Sometimes, you just feel too damn lazy to move.

It's your day off and you're lying in bed. The sun's pouring gently through the drapes, and you feel so warm and snugly that you don't want to move a muscle. But you know it's time to get up, so you imagine yourself moving, raising your head to find out what time it is. You tell yourself, "I'm going to move now". You even repeat silently to yourself, "Lift your head. Lift your head." But your body just won't move.

You aren't paralyzed. All your nerves are firing just fine. On some level, you feel that you could move, if you just wanted to hard enough. But you can't seem to make yourself want it enough. You can't muster up enough willpower to really try to try. For all the power your will seems to have over your legs, they might as well be made of lead.

4. Amnesia: It's normal to forget little things all the time. But occasionally a really drastic memory failure happens, and it feels as though you've jumped through time.

You're on the highway at night, and you're a little sleepy. The drive is monotonous; everything rushing by is the same, and the grey road just stretches on and on. It's about an hour till your next turn. But then, all of a sudden, there's your exit! And you think, "What? How did I just lose a whole hour?"

You obviously experienced each moment of that hour as it was happening--you know you didn't fall asleep, because if you had you would have crashed. But you just don't seem to have access to those memories for some reason. It's like you went on autopilot.

5. Reduced sensitivity to pain: This one's especially familiar to athletes.

You're in the final stretch of a marathon. You're sprinting now, giving it everything you've got, when suddenly you hit an uneven bit of ground and your ankle rolls. You know it's happened, but you keep going. There's a very mild, dull kind of nagging pain coming from your ankle, but it's easy to ignore, and you think nothing of it. After you cross the finish line, you collapse onto the grass beside the track. As you slowly catch your breath, you notice that your ankle is hurting more. Quite a lot, in fact. As you begin tearing up from the pain, you realize that you've probably sprained it severely.

There's no way you could tolerate putting weight on it at this point. Yet just a few minutes ago, you were sprinting as though nothing were wrong.

One More Ingredient

When experiences like this happen in the course of daily life, we don't usually recognize anything strange or spooky about them. If, however, we experience them when someone called a "hypnotist" is dangling a pendulum in front of us, we pay attention to them, and they no longer fuse so seamlessly with the rest of experience. Framing is everything.

Hypnosis seems to be some combination of suggestion, selective attention, catalepsy, amnesia, and reduced sensitivity to pain. These pieces of "hypnosis syndrome" happen to us frequently in all sorts of contexts. So perhaps there's one final, key ingredient to this apparently bizarre practice we call "hypnosis": the belief (or suspicion) that one is hypnotized.

I'm finally reading How To Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, which has been on my list for a year now. So far, I'm completely loving it, and I understand why it has remained so popular for most of a century.

Here is how the book works. I'll use Chapter 3 as an example.

Each chapter begins with a straightforward claim about successful socialization.

The only way on earth to influence other people is to talk about what they want and show them how to get it.

It then goes through many concrete examples, some taken from famous bits of history, others from students in the author's classes or from his own experiences.

At one time I rented the grand ballroom of a certain New York hotel for twenty nights in each season in order to hold a series of lectures.

At the beginning of one season, I was suddenly informed that I should have to pay almost three times as much rent as formerly. This news reached me after the tickets had been printed and distributed and all announcements had been made. 

Naturally, I didn't want to pay the increase, but what was the use of talking to the hotel about what I wanted? They were interested only in what they wanted. So a couple of days later I went to see the manager.

'I was a bit shocked when I got your letter,' I said, 'but I don't blame you at all. If I had been in your position, I should probably have written a similar letter myself. Your duty as the manager of the hotel is to make all the profit possible. If you don't do that, you will be fired and you ought to be fired. Now, let's take a piece of paper and write down the advantages and the disadvantages that will accrue to you, if you insist on this increase in rent.'

Then I took a letterhead and ran a line through the center and headed one column 'Advantages' and the other column 'Disadvantages.' 

I wrote down under the head 'Advantages' these words: 'Ballroom free.' Then I went on to say: 'You will have the advantage of having the ballroom free to rent for dances and conventions. That is a big advantage, for affairs like that will pay you much more than you can get for a series of lectures. If I tie your ballroom up for twenty nights during the course of the season, it is sure to mean a loss of some very profitable business to you.

Now, let's consider the disadvantages. First, instead of increasing your income from me, you are going to decrease it. In fact, you are going to wipe it out because I cannot pay the rent you are asking. I shall be forced to hold these lectures at some other place.

There's another disadvantage to you also. These lectures attract crowds of educated and cultured people to your hotel. That is good advertising for you, isn't it? In fact, if you spent five thousand dollars advertising in the newspapers, you couldn't bring as many people to look at your hotel as I can bring by these lectures. That is worth a lot to a hotel, isn't it?' 

As I talked, I wrote these two 'disadvantages' under the proper heading, and handed the sheet of paper to the manager, saying: 'I wish you would carefully consider both the advantages and disadvantages that were going to accrue to you and then give me your final decision.'

I received a letter the next day, informing me that my rent would be increased only 50 percent instead of 300 percent.

Mind you, I got this reduction without saying a word about what I wanted. I talked all the time about what the other person wanted and how he could get it.

Suppose I had done the human, natural thing; suppose I had stormed into this office and said, 'What do you mean by raising my rent three hundred percent when you know the tickets have been printed and the announcements made? Three hundred percent! Ridiculous! Absurd! I won't pay it!'

What would have happened then? An argument would have begun to steam and boil and sputter--and you know how arguments end. Even if I had convinced him that he was wrong, his pride would have made it difficult for him to back down and give in.

Interspersed are actionable instructions summarizing the methods illuminated by the examples.

Tomorrow you may want to persuade somebody to do something. Before you speak, pause and ask yourself: 'How can I make this person want to do it?'

Each chapter concludes with a concise statement of the principle discussed.

Arouse in the other person an eager want.

Up through my first year of college, I was mostly horrible with people, and I was proud of it. I didn't like people, I didn't want them to like me, and suggestions that being nice would make things easier offended me. I was cold and arrogant. I did seem to have a surprising amount of a certain kind of social success anyway, for I was always leading groups of various sorts, and people always insisted that my leadership was irreplaceable when I spoke of leaving. But my domain of social success was severely limited, and I was crippled by that.

I began to change when I finally concluded that my extreme arrogance would prevent me from befriending a worthy peer in the unlikely event that I might encounter one in college. I certainly didn't decide to become "good with people", but the resolution to become less arrogant, and my subsequent success (yes, believe it or not, I'm vastly less arrogant than once I was), began a success spiral that led me into a growth mindset where dramatic change seemed possible.

Toward the beginning of my second year of college, I decided to get very good at socialization. It was a time in my life when I was terribly excited to dive into Impossible Projects, and this was one. And I'm still in the midst of this one, but I've come a long way. I still have a few gaping holes in my social education. But I've taken the project seriously, and I really have learned a lot.

Recently, I began working on an essay summarizing what I've learned. The principles I've so far outlined are very nearly identical to those set forth in Carnegie's book.

Therefore, while reading this book, I respond to most of what he says with a feeling of, "Yes!!! This is so obviously right. Why didn't anyone ever explain this to me back when I needed it?"

There was a period of a few years between when I began the project and when I gained sufficient proficiency to generate these principles on my own when this book might have given me a giant boost. I might have shot ahead by as much as three years if it were perfectly timed. But before that period, it would have been useless to me. It would have been an imposition, one more person telling me the Right Way To Live as though I had any inclination to mar my personal aesthetic with their ugly morality. I wouldn't even have had the capacity to understand what "Give honest, sincere appreciation" meant.

So my worry is this. I don't know to what extent people might be able to use this book to actually grow rather than to merely feel either validated or offended.

I do suspect, however, that there exist many people in precisely the right stage of social development to benefit enormously. If you think you might be receptive to the sort of advice given above, I wholeheartedly recommend that you read How To Win Friends and Influence People, and in fact I suggest that you move it as near the top of your reading list as you can possibly stand.

These principles are powerful. When understood and practiced, they change everything, including your efficiency in accomplishing the things you'll waste a lot of time on before reading this book if you put it off. And I do think there's a good chance that reading the book will lead you to practice the principles, and thereby to understand them.

The Kindle version is $2.99, and it's a quick read. You'll know by the third chapter if it's for you.

I sense that more is possible in the art of memory.

There was a time when everyone remembered. There was a time before smart phones, before computers, before widespread literacy, and before writing, when there was nothing to do with a thought besides remember it. If you failed in that task, there would be no external reminder to fall back on--no index to browse, text message to dig up, no crumpled-up post-it at the bottom of your purse--and the thought would be lost forever. That time comprises the vast majority of  human history.

It's easy to imagine that members of pre-literate societies must have lived almost entirely in the moment, with no libraries or photographs to hold onto their past thoughts for them. But that is only because the art of memory has been so thoroughly replaced by external mnemonic technologies. Few of us have ever been prompted to explore the potential of internal memory.

Before the printing press, people were taught from childhood the powerful, ancient techniques of memory. How powerful? Powerful enough to create and pass down the 15,963-line Iliad for at least a hundred years before it was finally committed to paper. People in pre-literate societies were constantly immersed in their history, oral tradition, and the products of their previous mental labors. For all the incomprehensible breadth of humanity's new external memories, it is we who are bound to the present.

If you haven't heard of linking, memory palaces, or the Major System, the most basic introduction to mnemonics will demonstrate that you needn't be limited by the tiny capacity of your working memory once you've learned to embed information directly into long-term memory. I remember the first time I learned a twenty item list in just a few minutes. The encoding took effortful concentration (though it gets much easier with practice; I can now complete the same task in about 30 seconds), but the surprise and excitement I experienced with each item effortlessly recalled shattered deep resignations about my own cognitive limits. That was my first taste of the possibility in the art of memory.

I've since learned of the subculture of mnemonists, people who compete in the memory circuit. They travel all over the world to find out who can learn the longest string of random digits, lines of poetry, and shuffled decks of cards. I've learned that the only difference between myself and mental athletes is that I've never deliberately trained my skills. I could perform such feats if I tried, as could you.

I've not tried, though I have made my life much more efficient (I was once terribly forgetful and absent minded) by storing information in my very own brain for reliable recall any time I want to. If I don't want to lose my keys, I simply remember where they are. If I want to remember which bus stop I'm looking for, I needn't leaf through my notebook while standing in the cramped isle or pull up the right screen on my phone. I just remember. I never forget passwords, names, or my credit card number--not once I've decided to remember, anyway. These conveniences alone are well worth the half hour of study needed to become proficient in elementary mnemonics.

But there's just no way that this is all there is. About 2,600 years have passed since we began writing things down. And rather than putting to revolutionary use the internal memory software responsible for the Iliad by harnessing the ability to remember more important and different kinds of information, we're still mostly using it to remember our shopping lists while our hands are full? That can't be right.

Or can it? After all, there's no reason for most of us to know that a mole of carbon atoms is 6.022*10^23 atoms of carbon: In the unlikely event that you need to do stoichiometry, Wolfram Alpha will answer all of your questions. This much is certainly true. But in the context of a discussion of mnemonics, something about it feels off. "We don't need internal memory because our external memory is so much better" misframes the relationship between memory and learning.

If you take a 400 level college course, it probably has prerequisites. You must first have taken a related 300 or 200 level course. Why?

Because often, in order to learn things you first must know things. Human memory is a massive network of associations, and recognizing relationships among concepts requires each concept be located somewhere in that network. Without well-traveled pathways, the memories will get lost. They will find neither conscious awareness nor each other.

You cannot innovate, you cannot invent, and you cannot seamlessly integrate information stored only externally. Creativity is not a magical spell for creating something out of nothing. It's the ability to make new associations among old ideas and new data. To be creative, the raw materials must reside in internal memory. Wikipedia is simply not available to the subtle workings of fluid intelligence.

We should not allow technologies like writing to cause our memories to languish and atrophy. Rather, they should enrich our memories with much higher leverage information than was available to mnemonists past.

Our society has lost the art of memory because we can get away with being lazy. But how might the world be if each of us had a sprawling memory palace as lavishly furnished as that of an erudite Greek of 660 BCE? Imagine if it contained the most important information we encounter now.

This is the vision of a liberal arts education, after all; but while we spend longer than ever before--18 years at least--memorizing only to forget, we are no longer taught how to learn. If we all learned to think memorably, to keep the most important parts of past experience close at hand, how much more creative might we become? And what might we gain the ability to learn?

Further Resources

"You're becoming a very specific kind of guru," my best friend divulged after one of those long conversations that only happen on road trips. "You're like that character at the very beginning of a video game when there's a tutorial that teaches you things like, 'navigate with the arrow keys' and 'press A to jump'. Nobody will even survive for very long, let alone defeat the final boss, with just those skills. But if it weren't for knowledge like this we'd get stuck in corners and never regenerate more than a few feet from where we started."

In Summary

The availability heuristic is a mental shortcut we use in place of time-consuming statistical algorithms when making decisions under uncertainty.

When we estimate the likelihood of being eaten by a grumple bug, we substitute for other statistical methods a subjective measurement of how easy it is to imagine being eaten by a grumple bug. If I live in a small nomadic tribe where no one has ever recounted the tale of how his great aunt was eaten by a grumple bug while out hunting--indeed, a tribe where no one has ever even heard of a grumple bug--I'll understandably estimate the likelihood of being eaten by a grumple bug to be low. As a result, I'll spend very little time worrying about grumple bugs, and will instead devote my resources to watching for dangers I hear about all the time, like tigers, rival tribes, and poisonous mushrooms that take your soul to the afterlife even before your body bites the dust. Grumple bugs aren't very available in memory compared to tigers.

If, however, the tale of the time great aunt Cathy was eaten by a tiger while out on a hunt is told over and over again around the camp fire, I may begin to spend more of my time watching out for tigers than avoiding heat exhaustion. Never mind that heat exhaustion is actually much more likely and equally deadly. When that happens, the availability heuristic dons its other masque: the availability bias.

Ease of Imagery

Availability, as both a heuristic and a bias, apparently comes down to ease of imagery. By "imagery", I mean something broader than "how easy it is to conjure up a visual representation". When you imagine a tiger, you probably don't just see a still photograph or painting of a tiger in your mind. Imagination can be fully immersive; imaginary tigers are big and orange with black stripes, but they also growl, slink stealthily while stalking prey, drip wet blood from their fangs, and smell of musk and raw meat.

Several things contribute to ease of imagery. One is actual frequency in the local environment, which might  or might not match global frequency. Maybe grumple bugs are a thing a couple hundred miles south, and I'll be caught unaware if the tribe heads that direction. Another is repetition. It's useful to rely on ease of imagery when I'm unlikely to hear about grumple bugs very often in a place where there are no grumple bugs; on the other hand, I'll probably hear about tigers more frequently than the occurrence of tigers in the local environment warrants, because tiger stories are way more gripping than heat exhaustion stories. They have conflict, protagonists, antagonists, narrative arcs, and often social drama. That's the formula for deep significance to a human brain. "Tom died 'cause he got too hot" doesn't measure up. As with tigers on the ancestral savanna, so too with cougars in the modern American Midwest, alligators in the sewers of New York, and kidney theft.

Tigers seem more at home in the imagination than does heat exhaustion, don't they? I can come up with an equally detailed description of heat exhaustion if I try, but it takes more work. There's something more going on with ease of imagery than frequency of exposure and narrative structure. Since I'm cheating with the picture of the tiger in the top right, imagine instead a human-sized duck holding an umbrella while playing a kazoo.

Got it? Ok, now imagine the availability heuristic. Very different sort of experience, right?

Here's what's up with the wacky duck. The duck is simple, concrete, vivid (for multiple sensory modalities), and emotionally engaging (humorous, specifically, and also surprising due to its strangeness). The availability heuristic, by contrast, is complicated, abstract, murky, and boring (at least at first blush).

To recap, the core of availability is ease of imagery, which is a combination of frequency of exposure (repetition), meaningful narrative context, concreteness, vividness, and emotional impact.

It's not true, of course, that drugged travelers sometimes wake up in bathtubs full of ice to discover that their interanal organs have been stolen for sale on the black market. But it's a concrete, vivid, meaningful story oft repeated for emotional impact, so people accept it as fact before System Two ever gets a chance to go, "Wait a minute, you want me to believe what?"

Further Resources

• intro to availability by Eliezer Yudkowsky
• study of ease of imagery, purposful imagining, and availability
• study of emotion and availability
• wonderful book about why some ideas survive and others die
• the next post in this sequence, which I'll link to as soon as it exists and will be about engineering memory for availability

I'm a recovering Catholic. Although I don't believe in God and don't attend Mass except on rare occasion for the purpose of singing, I miss the Sacraments dearly, and in particular I miss the Sacrament of Reconciliation.

I get that Confession seems kinda weird at first blush. You're telling someone who may or may not be a total stranger about all of the bad things you did, highly personal and otherwise, possibly in great detail, in order to receive imaginary forgiveness from an imaginary god, and then you're letting the stranger dole out a punishment that might not be at all related to your actual sins. I can understand why that would appear creepy, pointless, and horribly unpleasant, perhaps even to a pseudo-Catholic let alone to an atheist and total outsider.

Let me see if I can explain why anyone would ever be motivated to go to Confession out of something besides obligation or fear of damnation. Catholics often say that the Sacraments are "outward signs of inward grace". When I was little, coming to understand (some of) what they meant by that had a pretty profound effect. Abstract ideas like contrition, forgiveness, devotion, and faith are invisible and elusive. It's not always easy to get your brain around them enough for them to impact your daily life.

It's a bit like when you genuinely believe that it's a good idea to learn calculus, but "calculus" feels like such a murky, distant, impenetrable concept that you're not sure how to do anything about it. Sacraments are concrete symbols for abstract ideas and events that help you get a handle on similarly murky things like your relationship with God.

If I made a Catholic-style sacramental rite out of calculus, it would go something like this.

1. Recite: "Mathematics is vast and immaculate. My understanding is meager and flawed. May studying the Calculus one day unite me with Mathematical perfection. Amen."
2. Open a Calculus textbook. Read a section. Do the exercises. Reflect on what I do and don't understand, what I could have done better, and what flaws in my pre-existing understanding are preventing me from progressing further.
3. State my current understanding of what I read to a professor. Show them my exercises. Listen to their feedback. 
4. The professor recites: "Mathematics is vast and immaculate. May your understanding advance toward perfection. In the name of the Calculus, I grant you your next assignment." (I receive the assignment.)

Reconciliation is similar.

1. Examine my conscience. Call to mind the sins I've committed, and reflect on them.
2. Recite (something along the lines of): "Most merciful God, I confess that I have sinned against you in thought, word, and deed, by what I have done, and by what I have left undone. I have not loved you with my whole heart; I have not loved my neighbors as myself. I am truly sorry, and I humbly repent. For the sake of your Son Jesus Christ, have mercy on me and forgive me; that I may delight in your will, and walk in your ways, to the glory of your Name. Amen."
3. Go to a priest and tell him what I've done wrong. Maybe talk to him about it a bit so I better understand why I did what I did and why I am sorry.
4. The priest says, "Almighty God have mercy on you, forgive you all your sins through our Lord Jesus Christ, strengthen you in all goodness, and by the power of the Holy Spirit keep you in eternal life." Then he assigns a penance, an actionable plan for atonement, and I carry it out.

Inasmuch as reconciliation can have positive effects--and I think it can(1)--what we're dealing with here is a sort of urge propagation.

Something important happened to me tonight.

On the train home, an old black man with patchy gray hair was slumped pathetically across the seats in clear view of where I sat. With a torn and dirty jacket draped over his shoulders, he cradled his head in his hands, propped up on the armrest while his legs stretched out to the seat opposite him.

He was not in good shape. He was trembling slightly, and his long yellowing fingernails tapped against the armrest. Every couple of minutes, he would lean over slightly and spit a thin stream of vomit onto the floor of the train. Once when he shifted, the left arm of his jacket fell down into the puddle.

His unwashed, tattered appearance suggested he was riding the train more for the shelter than to go anywhere in particular. Anything looks more comfortable than his awkward position across those seats, but I suppose the concrete must get awfully cold and hard after a while.

I've never been one to reach out and help strangers whose lives have fallen apart, even when all they ask of me is a dollar for some food. I once felt at least a little bit of empathy for them. Mostly, though, what I felt was helpless.

Making one person's day slightly less horrific just isn't a very good use of my money, time, or emotional energy. To be mumbling paranoid nonsense on a street corner while you slowly starve and freeze is to live a life so shattered that picking up any one of the pieces will not restore wholeness. My dollar will not save anyone, and, more saliently to me, will not bring an end to the conditions that allow such misery to exist in the first place. I do believe that I can bring an end to those conditions, but not by helping any individual person in misery. So I've learned to feel very little at all when I pass them without more than a brief glance.

But I was seated beside him for several minutes, so I could not walk past. I probably could have ignored him anyway if I'd chosen, but for some reason, this time I engaged my thoughts and emotions. I guess I was curious. I wondered what it might be like to be inside his head.

And this is when the important thing happened. As soon as I felt the first pang of empathy, I imagined the world I was trying to create. I felt suffering with him (tiny though  mine was), and immediately, automatically, I envisioned a future free of suffering. It wasn't so much like flicking a switch as like being the flicked switch. I did not participate deliberatively in this event.

It was familiar to feel responsible for his pain, and for all the pain in the world. I've long been wired that way. Yet I felt neither helpless, nor guilty, nor even charitable confronting the experience. I just knew, more plainly and clearly than I ever have, that the future of humanity will not be so ugly as that present moment in which a tragic old man failed to sleep above a growing puddle of vomit.

And simultaneously I knew that it would not be that way because I would not let it. On one side was the man on the train, on the other the salvation of all sentient beings, and bridging the two states of affairs was a solid progression of cause and effect consisting of precisely the kinds of actions I take every day.

There's a CFAR unit called "propagating urges" in which students learn to take their desires to accomplish long-term goals and use them to fuel motivation for the individual actions required to accomplish those goals. For instance, I might propagate the urge to grade all 70 essays so I can successfully complete my degree by imagining receiving my diploma every time I reach for a new page.

I think I may not need to propagate urges when it comes to my work anymore. The drudgery of carrying out the kind of altruism I consider maximally effective is saving the world. It's suddenly become a simple fact of my life. The world will be saved, and I will save it.

Effective altruism is altruism that attempts to be maximally effective. An effective altruist chooses her charitable actions not, for instance, by thinking of what she's most passionate about (helping the homeless, say) and then taking the most obvious, readily available actions, or those with the most emotional impact for her (like volunteering at a soup kitchen), but instead tries to take into account all the possible ways she might have of affecting the world, and then picking the one she expects, based on empirical evidence and careful thought, to cause the most good.

Some people's answer to, "What's the most good I can do?" is "Donate to the charity that's most cost-effective at saving lives." (It's orders of magnitude more effective to donate to the Against Malaria Foundation than to donate to your local children's hospital, for example.) Some take non-human animals into account and end up with very different kinds of answers, as you can imagine given how many more non-humans there are than humans. Some think the answer is to choose a career that will make them as much money as possible while doing relatively little harm so they'll eventually have lots more money with which to do good. Some think preventing the sudden extinction of all of humanity ("reducing existential risk") is more effectively altruistic than any specific short-term act of charity we could perform for an individual.

The effective altruists focused on the far distant future are those who value future people as much as current people, and who believe that the distant future is likely to to contain vastly more people than the present. This is the category I fall into. A focus on the far distant future can look even less like conventional charity, because some methods of affecting the future of humanity can be extremely unintuitive. Some people intend to eradicate death caused by aging. One organization called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute intends to build and artificial intelligence that understands and cares primarily about human values, can modify its own code in order to get better at effective altruism, and by this means ends up way better than any human could ever be at making the entire future awesome.

So effective altruism is extremely diverse. It can be giving a dollar directly to someone who needs it, or it can be researching how to teach a computer what humans care about. What matters is the motivation: effective altruists want to be effective, and they try to know something about how to do that.

A few organizations in what's recently become know as "the EA movement":

• Give Directly, which takes your dollar and hands it directly to someone in Kenya
• Giving What We Can, which encourages people to pledge 10% of their income to effective charities
• Give Well, which researches charities and ranks them by lives saved per dollar donated
• 80,000 Hours, which provides career advice for people who want to find the path toward doing the most good
• Effective Animal Activism, which aims to prevent as much animal suffering as possible
• Leverage Research, which studies how to make humanity better at things on a very large scale
• The Center for Applied Rationality, which researches how to help individual people become better at things
• Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS), which researches how to cure aging
• The Machine Intelligence Research Institute, which studies how to make a smarter-than-human computer that makes the world better

For a somewhat more in-depth look at the EA movement, check out lukeprog's summary on lesswrong.com, written shortly after the very first Effective Altruism Summit in July, 2013. Or see Peter Singer's Ted Talk on the topic if you're tired of reading.

Guns don't kill people. The boundary conditions of the universe kill people.

A friend of mine shared this image on Facebook, and it showed up in my feed. I have some things to say to all of you, pro-life and pro-choice alike, about it.

I feel like we're talking past each other. And by "we" I mean everyone. This image really bothers me, not because there are guns pointed at a fetus, or because I strongly support Planned Parenthood, but because it reinforces the misrepresentation of the pro-choice position as anti-life. This really is not so far from an image of pro-choicers eating babies.

If we want to make progress, we have to be willing to communicate and collaborate rather than antagonize, and that means making an honest effort to understand the beliefs and motives of those who disagree with us. The terms "pro-life" and "pro-choice" are already a huge barrier, because they frame the issue confusingly and counterproductively.

If I understand correctly, and I've made an honest effort to, people who support legislation that denies a women the right to kill a fetus, should one begin growing inside her body, do so because they believe fetuses are a type of child, and therefore a moral patient toward whom we are responsible as we would be any other person.There are variations, of course: Some believe fetuses have human souls, and that the same religious doctrines apply to them as to any other child of God. Some are concerned that since we can't currently be certain at what point a developing human becomes capable of suffering, we're obligated to behave as though even a zygote can suffer. But by and large, those who want to restrict reproductive rights in favor of the rights of fetuses believe that humans are people regardless of their age, be that three days, three months, or thirty years. The right of a person to live is more fundamental than the specific rights a person has over her body. Not only does this make good sense to me, but I agree on that final point, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who doesn't.

But it is inane, petty, and intellectually dishonest to suggest that we can rightly conclude from knowledge of someone's anti-abortion beliefs that she therefore does not highly value women's reproductive rights. Let alone that she therefore hates women and wants the government to dictate everything that happens to her body.

The implicit claim of this image is similarly inane, petty, and dishonest. It suggests that if a person doesn't support legislation that limits women's access to medical procedures that kill fetuses, she therefore thinks such specific rights should be valued above the right of a person not to be killed. It shouldn't take more than five seconds to see the problem here. Perhaps one need be a monster to murder another person in cold blood, but that's not even in the ballpark of concluding that embryos don't have enough of the relevant properties to be thought of as people.

If we didn't childishly divide ourselves along these lines into the good people and the evil people, the humanists and the misogynists, the godly and the baby killers, both sides could make progress toward what they value at the same time. If we saw each other as people instead of as murderers who hold guns to the heads of unborn babies, we could join forces to decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies, to support mothers who do want children, to ease the burden of caring for an infant so the prospect of carrying to term isn't so devastating when things don't go as planned. And all the while, we could continue talking about the core issue, which is what a fetus really is and what rights it ought to have, and people will be a hell of a lot more willing to change their minds when recognizing the truth doesn't mean joining The Dark Side.

So regardless of your position on abortion, it is not in your interest, or the interest of those whose rights you want to protect, to promote hatred, misunderstanding, and the desire to Defeat the Enemy. Instead, promote kindness, promote understanding, and promote collaboration toward shared goals. Do not post this garbage. If you're on my feed or reading this blog, you're almost certainly above it.

A group of my friends (7 so far) will all be going polyphasic over the next month. By that, I mean we'll be adopting a sleep schedule that gets us 4 extra hours of productive work or play time per day, or two whole month per year (or a decade over 60 years). If you want to tell me all about why it's a bad idea, feel free to post comments. I don't plan to use this space to sell you on polyphasic sleep. That might be another post, depending on how this goes.

I'm going to be collecting some very simple data through this here form. I invite you to join us!

This will be hard. It will hurt. You'll probably need a buddy to follow you around and keep you awake. If you don't have a lot of self-discipline, I don't recommend even trying.

Still with me? If you're in by the time you're done reading this, email me at strohl89@gmail.com so I know who you are. Here's the plan.

1. Stop using caffeine RIGHT NOW. If you try to maintain a caffeine addition during this process, you will fail. I promise.
2. Data collection starts on July 10th. Fill out the form once every 24hrs (whenever it's convenient) until August 10th.
3. Pick a time to take a 20min nap each day from Monday, July 15th through Sunday, July 21st. You probably won't actually sleep during this time, but you can use it for mindfulness meditation if you stay awake. The goal is to practice napping. This is important.
4. On Monday, July 22nd, begin fasting immediately after lunch.
5. On the night of Monday, July 22nd, skip sleep. No naps, then an all-nighter. This is the official adaptation start date. The idea is to make you sleep deprived so your naps the next day are more likely to take.
6. Eat breakfast on the morning of Tuesday, July 23rd. This should be the first time you've eaten anything since Monday lunch.
7. Starting on the morning of Tuesday, July 23rd, take a 20min nap every 2hrs (for a total of 12 naps per day). DO NOT oversleep. Use an obnoxious alarm or whatever other means necessary. "Nap" counts as lying down trying to sleep; take your naps on a strict schedule regardless of how long you successfully sleep.
8. Start to cut your naps down toward 6 a day as quickly as you can without it hurting too much. Beginning to dream during your naps is a good indicator that you're ready for this part.
9. Once you're down to one nap every 4 hours, you're on what's known as the Uberman schedule.
10. Matt Fallshaw informs me that the next part is a little tricky.
1. If you managed to reach the Uberman feeling good, you'll probably start getting really tired again shortly thereafter. This flavor of tired will be different from what you've suffered for the past week, and by that flavor you will know that you have hit SWS deprivation. If this is what happens to you, the new kind of sleepy is your cue to transition straight to the Everyman 3 schedule, which means a 3 hour block of core sleep plus three 20 minute naps spaced evenly throughout the day. And that's it!
2. If you're unlucky, you'll not quite have reached Uberman in the space of a week--that is, you'll still be hanging on to some extra naps on July 30th. Then you'll be wolloped by a new bout of sleepiness. This flavor of tired will be different from the last. If it's is tolerable, drop straight to full Uberman and try to hold out for at least 24hrs, then convert to the Everyman 3. If the new flavor of tired is intolerable, convert to E3 as soon as the new tired hits, and expect the next week or so to be tougher on you than on the lucky ones.

Why are we doing this weird naptation adaptation plan thing instead of just going straight for the Everyman 3? Mostly because Matthew Fallshaw said to. If you know Matt, that's enough. In case you don't: It takes people about a month to adapt to the Everyman 3, but only about a week to adapt to the Uberman. The Uberman forces your body to learn to get its REM and SWS in those tiny 20 minute naps. If you're still giving it core sleep time, your body won't take the fullest possible advantage of naps right away.

If you think you can keep the Uberman schedule indefinitely, go for it! But keep me informed about it so I know what's up with my data.

***
You can read about how this panned out in my next post.

What Makes a Baby, by Cory Silverberg, is an introduction to human reproduction written and illustrated for kids as young as 4. The awesomeness: It doesn't assume that the reader is biologically related to his (exactly) two parents, both of whom are cisgendered and straight, and both of whom are married and monogamous. It explains the plain facts of the biology in a way children can understand, and it otherwise leaves the narrative of how the reader came to her current family for the family to tell. Check it out!

"When an egg and a sperm meet, they swirl together in a special kind of dance. As they dance, they talk to each other. The egg tells the sperm all the stories it has to tell about the body it came from."

You can order a hard copy through Amazon, or read the Kindle version right now, and the 60 page accompanying reader's guide for adults is available as a free PDF.

But instead of just buying it, what I really want you to do is make sure your local library orders it if it hasn't already!

(Inspired by "Schelling fences and slippery slopes" by Yvain.)

Dear everyone who keeps human larvae as pets,

I am sincerely happy if you've found a way to satisfy your central values and if your children make you happy. Honestly, there are central terms for the preferences and happiness of others in my utility function. So please only read the following in light of that. I am not criticizing you for choosing to spawn, and, indeed, your kids are adorable and I like watching videos on Facebook of them playing with puppies and eating cake with their entire faces, so keep it up.

Here's what's bothering me. When I look at the walls of my friends with children, almost every post involves the kid. This is perfectly understandable. I also post almost exclusively about the things that interest me most (namely rationality, dance, and math), and of course your kid is the most important thing in the entire world. If I had a kid, I'd almost certainly think the same thing about it. I would love it more than I knew I could love, and everything else would be at least second place.

And I find that ABSOLUTELY TERRIFYING. It means that there exists a parasite that can first implant itself in the lining of my uterus, with or without my consent, and use me as an incubator before torturing me for hours or days as it extricates itself from my body.

And that's not the scary part.

It can then begin to covertly re-write the foundations of my personality, undermining my adherence to beliefs about the significance of my own happiness, the happiness of my friends, self-optimization, world-optimization, and anything whatsoever not directly necessary for its own survival. In fact, it would make sure that I'd not even hesitate to die (or kill) protecting it, regardless of whether its continued existence would most likely help or hurt the other things I (used to) care about.

From my perspective, this strikes me as a completely insane thing to desire. It's like wanting to take a pill that won't satisfy your values, but will change your values such that current circumstances already satisfy them, never mind that it means replacing yourself with SOMEONE ELSE ENTIRELY.

How the hell do people just take that in stride???

You have definitely heard "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" at some point. It's the one with the chorus that goes "Glory, glory, halleluiah, etc., His truth is marching on." I heard the melody at a swing dance last night, and as all three lyrics of the chorus that I knew were playing incessantly through my head on the way home, I started to wonder what the rest of them might be. When I finally looked them up, I was shocked by how strange, powerful, and violent the verses really are. "He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword" is not something I generally expect to hear in an apparently upbeat popular song.

Until today, there's been no better way to put me to sleep than to start talking about American Civil War history. Boy has this changed things! I now feel an overwhelming pride to be the same species as the creatures who took part in creating this song--mixed, of course, with crushing disappointment that my American history classes failed so spectacularly. In case yours did too, here's why The Battle Hymn of the Republic is awesome.

Julia Howe

Just before the cold dawn of a November morning in 1861, poet and activist Julia Howe awoke from a dream. Beating against the cage of her skull were lyrics begging to be committed to paper. Stumbling in the dark for the nearest pen, frantically she wrote. Her verses were first published in Atlantic Monthly in February of 1862, about a year after the beginning of the Civil War.

The day before that dawn, she'd attended a public review of troops just outside Washington, DC. While the soldiers were gathered, they began to sing. They sang these words, to the tune of a snippet from an old campfire spiritual called "Canaan's Happy Shore", and Howe listened to their song.

John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
John Brown's body lies a-mouldering in the grave
But his soul keeps marching on

Who is this John Brown, 

and what has he to do with the meaning of Howe's song?

Some consider Brown a terrorist, others a hero. To the troops through which first "John Brown's Body" and then "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" shot light lightning, clearly he was a martyr.

Five years earlier, during the Bleeding Kansas border war, Brown distinguished himself from other abolitionists by insisting that passive resistance to southern slavery advocates would do nothing but protect the complacency of free northerners. If the Good Guys are to win, he thought, they'll have to actually do something. And he knew that it would have to involve violence.

His biographers say he believed he'd been sent to visit God's justice upon slaveholders and those who supported them. Whatever his motivation, he caused people to ask themselves, "How much do I care about what I believe? What will I do if I'm called to act? Would I fight for freedom? Would I kill? Would I die?"

In 1859, under Brown's command, some proved that the answer was "yes". His very own army set out to raid a federal armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia. Their objective: Arm the local slaves for insurection. The raid was unsuccessful, and Brown was captured by the forces of Robert E. Lee.

In the following months, it became apparent that many more really would fight for freedom with their own hands. A year after John Brown's death, the song of his vision coursing through the northern air, half of a country went to war to save four million people they'd never even met.

This is the story Julia Howe immortalized when she wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic".

Why is this my new favorite song?

Because it means that when it matters enough, when a strong enough leader arises, sometimes--not always, but sometimes--humans will abandon personal comfort to fight for a better world.

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord;
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
His truth is marching on.

Note: A shorter version of this post will appear at A Moment Of Science very soon. If you're interested in my extra sciencey stuff, that's where to watch.

Alice peers through the looking glass.

When I was a little baby freshman philosopher, one of my very first professors asked me this question: Why do mirrors flip images left and right, but not up and down? 

At first, I didn't understand what this had to do with philosophy (not that I knew what philosophy was--which was exactly his point!). It sounded like physics to me, and answering surely required knowledge of optics that I didn't possess.

Today, I consider the process of working out the answer to this question one of the very best illustrations of philosophical methodology I've ever seen. This an ode to figuring things out.

Understanding the Question

First, let's make sure we know what the problem is.

Imagine that you're you. (This is either very easy or very difficult, but I'm not sure which.) Or go find an actual glove and just be you. Either way. Now put a glove on your left hand, leave your right hand bare, and stand in front of a mirror. What do you see? You see an image that looks just like you, except she’s wearing a glove on her right hand while her left hand is bare.

This is what we mean when we say that mirrors seem to flip images left and right. But if they flip left and right, why don’t they reverse up and down as well? Why isn't your mirror image standing on her head? How does the mirror know which way is “up”?

Guess

Let's try making a few guesses. Guessing give us something to work with.

1. Maybe it has to do with binocular vision. You can draw an imaginary line from one eye to the other, and that line is horizontal. Could that be responsible for the strange asymmetry?
2. Or maybe the molecules in the mirror somehow constantly re-orient themselves according to the nearest large source of gravity. If your last chemistry or physics class was in high school, this is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. Maybe some feature of the molecular orientation causes the asymmetry. Mirrors would have to do it really quickly so that if you flip a mirror 180 degrees, the molecules will have already adjusted before you could see an upside-down image.
3. Or perhaps mirrors are made of thousands of long thin tiles laid side by side. Each one reflects light both up-down and left-right, but they’re so thin in the up-down flipping direction that the big combined reflection is only flipped left-right.

Check

We've got some guesses above, and we want to know if any of them is correct. Let's see how far we can get with just thinking before we have to turn the problem over to professional scientists.

1. Suppose it's true that mirrors do what they do because of binocular vision. What does that mean exactly? It means mirrors seem to know which way is "up" because our eyes are two points defining a line. A line can be an axis, and we think of this particular one as horizontal. If you have one axis, you can imagine another that's perpendicular to the first, and in this case we'd think of that one as vertical. Now we've got a reference frame for what is "left" vs. what is "up". The guess is that this reference frame determines our perception of our reflection in the mirror.
   
   What could we predict if we knew that were true? Well, we'd expect to be able to change what the mirror seems to count as "up" by changing the orientation of that horizontal axis defined by our eyes. So let's check.
   
   While standing in front of the mirror with the glove on your left hand, spread your arms and lean over so that your left hand is up in the air, your right hand is reaching toward the floor, and your head is tilted 90 degrees from to its usual position. What do you see?
   
   The mirror hasn’t fallen for your trick, has it? Your reflection is still wearing a glove on her right hand, which is reaching up--but her feet are exactly where they were before despite being to the “right” from the perspective of your head rather than “down”. So binocular vision can't be the answer.
2. Our second guess was that the molecules re-orient according to the location of the nearest large gravity well. This one's harder. To test this, it seems you’d either need a gravity well more massive than Earth (which I really hope you don’t have handy), or you’d need a rocket ship headed for the moon with a camera mounted on it filming a mirror as the Moon’s gravity took over. That’s not an impossible test, but it’s not a cheap one either. And it just doesn't quite feel right, does it? But that's not enough to dismiss the hypothesis.
   
   We've mostly escaped the realm of thought experiments at this point. But that doesn't mean it's time to stop thinking. Let’s assume, just for now, that this won’t give us the answer and try some other things first.
3. The third guess is that mirrors are made of zillions of long thin tiles. Each strip flips the image up/down as well as left/right, but they're so thin you don't see the up/down part. I'm pretty fuzzy on how zillions of thin tiles would end up making a single, cohesive, life-sized image. Perhaps that's a problem for another day. But let's take that for granted and see what happens.
   
   This is much easier to test. If the tile hypothesis is correct, you should be able to make an up-down flipping mirror by turning a left-right flipping mirror sideways. But that's not actually what happens, is it? So this can't be the answer either.

Time For a Closer Look

It’s looking even more now like the mirror somehow knows which way is “up”. As a general rule of problem solving, when you end up more sure that household items are conscious than you were when you began, it’s time to re-check your assumptions.

We assume two key things when we ask, “Why do mirrors flip images left and right, but not up and down?” First, we assume that mirrors flip images left and right. Second, we assume that mirrors don’t flip images up and down.

Let’s start with the second. What would it mean if you, out in the real world and not in mirror land, flipped yourself in the up/down direction? It would mean you were standing on your head. You’d have rotated yourself 180 degrees around the (horizontal) x axis. Mirror images don’t stand on their heads when we stand on our feet, so assumption two is correct. Mirrors really don’t flip images up and down.

But what would it mean if you flipped yourself left/right? If flipping up and down means rotating 180 degrees around the x axis, then flipping left and right must mean rotating 180 degrees around the (vertical) y axis. 

Rotating around the y axis is what we usually call “turning around”. Is that actually what mirrors do? Do they make turned-around pictures of us?

Imagine that you make a perfect, flesh-and-blood copy of yourself. She, too, is wearing a glove on her left hand. Place her in front of you so that you’re looking at her back. Now, while you stay perfectly still, rotate her 180 degrees around the y axis--that is, turn her around to face you.

Where is her glove? Why, it’s still on her left hand! To shake gloved hands, you’d have to reach across your body. If she were a mirror image, it would be on her right hand, not her left. So the first assumption must be wrong. Mirrors do not, in fact, flip images left-and-right.

So what’s really going on?

There’s only one obvious dimension left for flipping. If it’s not up and down, and it’s not left and right, then it must be back to front. But what would that mean?

Take off your glove, and hold it so the thumb is on your left and the palm is facing up. If you turn it upside down, the palm is facing down. If you turn it around from the starting position, the thumb is on your right.

Now, again from the starting position, turn the glove inside out without turning it in any other direction. The wrist part of the glove, which used to be closest to you, is now farthest away, while the the fingers are pointing toward you. It has not flipped upside down. It has not turned left or right. The glove has flipped front-to-back, and it now fits on your right hand instead of your left. 

If that’s what mirrors were doing, then what would you expect to see?

Suppose you’re looking at a mirror while facing North. The part of you that’s farthest South in reality, namely your bottom, would seem farthest North in the image--and, indeed, it does. The part that’s farthest North in reality, namely your nose, would seem farthest South in the image--and, indeed, it does.

You wouldn’t expect, however, to have to reach across your body to shake gloved hands, and you wouldn’t expect your image to do a headstand without your help.

That’s it, then! Mirrors don’t know which way is up after all. They just flip images front-to-back.

The Beauty Of Confusion

To review: 

• We asked a question. 
• We took some time to understand what was being asked. 
• We made a few guesses. 
• We tested them in our heads when we could, and pinned down how to go about testing them outside our heads when we couldn't. 
• When none of that gave us the answer, we doubled back to check our assumptions. 
• In the end, we solved the problem by dispelling a simple misunderstanding hidden in the question. 

Misunderstandings hide in questions all the time. If you're impatient and epistemically reckless, that's horribly frustrating, and it probably causes you to waste a lot of time trying to answer questions that don't make sense. This is much of why a healthy helping of philosophy is a tasty and nutritious side-dish even when science is your main course. If you're patient and rigorous, if you enjoy taking the time to simply think, you can learn all kinds of new things just by reflecting on them. 

Nifty, huh?

"Hang on a minute here, you're thinking. "At first we wanted to know why mirrors flip images left/right but not up/down. Turns out we were confused about that. But now I don't know why mirrors flip images front/back but not left/right or up/down!"

Learn More

Our relationship has changed over the years as easily as I have changed myself. It does not fit in a box called "mother/daughter". Everything about our interactions means more to me because of that.

Mom's a good friend of mine these days. We have a lot in common, and we make each other happy. I learn from her, she learns from me, and we think of each other as peers with a lot of love and history between us.

When I'm making a difficult decision, I ask for her advice because I value her opinion, and I'm never worried that I'll let her down by not doing what she suggests. No topic is out of bounds; she tells me about cute boys she's dating, recounts Sunday homilies when they inspire her (though she knows I'm an atheist), and gets genuinely excited when I tell her about a cool book I'm reading, even if it's about number theory.

I look up to her because she is a wise and compassionate woman worthy of my admiration and gratitude. I honor her today because she is an exceptional human being. I am tremendously lucky that she also happens to be my mother.

A couple of years ago, my boyfriend and I had both come down with bad colds. We went to the pharmacy, and he planned to grab some cold medicine while I picked up tissues and some other groceries. When he failed to meet me at the front after I was done, I went back to the aisle where I’d left him. He was staring at the wall of medicines looking perplexed and frustrated. “What’s taking so long?” I said.

“I don’t know how to choose!” he replied. There were dozens of options, and he couldn’t come up with a good way to evaluate them. He’d been stumped for fifteen minutes. He was experiencing choice paralysis. “There are a dozen different brands that all say they’re for stuffy noses, congestion, and coughing. How am I supposed to pick one?”

I picked up a few bottles to check out the active ingredients. “Anything with dextromethorphan, guicinophen, and phenylephrine will do,” I said.

“Why?”
What if, I wondered, there is even more to learn?

Secular groups should devote more resources to rationality activism. If you know what I mean by "rationality activism" and agree that we should be focusing on it more, you can stop here. Otherwise, read on.

Activism?

People get a little jumpy sometimes when I mention "activism" in the context of the secular movement. It often brings to mind "evangelical atheists" and concerted efforts to undermine religion. That's a scary picture when we've made so much progress toward establishing inviting communities, engaging in productive dialogues with religious organizations, and improving the atheist image. But I think this comes from a misunderstanding about what a secular group is and could be.

There's a lot of uncertainty surrounding our relationship with religious people and organizations. Many individual members have at least an intuition that there's something genuinely harmful about religion (or particular kinds of religion), and that the world would be better off without it. I strongly sympathize. Many central features of most of the largest religions are frightening and dangerous. On the other hand, even if a secular group wanted to fight religion explicitly, the project would probably fail. It isn't a practical strategy. (I'll happily defend that for anyone who asks me to, but since my goal is to describe an alternative method that would sidestep this issue, I'm not going to use this space to re-hash that apparently endless "confrontation vs. accommodation" debate.) 

So a lot of groups make the primary focus community building; one thing atheists lack is a ready-made community center where they know they'll be welcomed and accepted. It's very important secular groups maintain that particular function, whatever else we do in addition. At the very least, a strong community is simply a prerequisite for a successful community-based activist project.

The mistake we frequently make is in thinking that we must either be anti-religious or avoid activism entirely. This is silly. There is a positive approach to activism that makes sense for us, and not only would taking it give us direction, but we're uniquely situated to make rapid and far-reaching improvements to the world should we unite toward this goal.

Religion is not the problem.

"Activism" is about passionate, coordinated efforts to change the world. What secular activism should be depends on what changes we want to make to the world. What are those changes? What counts as "winning" for the secular movement? I don't think "equal social status and protection under the laws for non-religious people" is the answer to that particular question, even if it's definitely a significant improvement to the current situation. (It is, of course, a mission particular organizations within the secular movement should be focusing on. I'm speaking more generally, and especially to student groups.) It's certainly a crucial step along the path, but our preoccupation with science, for example, is evidence that we already have our sights set higher than that.

If we really stop to think about it, I doubt "the end of religion" is the answer either. Imagine that, overnight, all organized religion disappears. Everything else remains the same, but nobody goes to church, nobody prays, and nobody believes in God. I'll definitely grant that this is a net improvement. Shall we call it a day and keep to ourselves from here on out, or is there more work to be done?

Before the advent of this anti-religious miracle, what bothered me about religion was a very simple matter: Many religious memes are powerful deterrents to rational decision making. They can act as parasites that latch onto our cognitive biases and drain away whatever potential we have to inoculate ourselves against them. My concern is not, at heart, with religion itself, but with its exacerbation of irrationality that comes pre-installed in human brains to start with. Self-reinforcing systematic irrationality causes incredible damage, and is plausibly responsible for all of the harm religion has ever done.

If it weren't for this particular feature, I wouldn't care much about religion, and I suspect most atheists (and anti-theists) wouldn't either. Religious people would simply be wrong, like someone who thinks the moon is made of cheese, and that would be that. 

This is why we secularists also spend our time educating people about homeopathy, chiropractic, and astrology when we get together in groups. We care about a deeper problem than religion.

We don't so much want the end of religion as the dawn of rationality.

Rationality Activism

Rationality activism means raising the sanity waterline. The notion of rationality I have in mind amounts to "systematic optimization from inside a human brain". I do not mean, for example, never relying on intuition to make decisions, ignoring emotion, or valuing only quantifiable things. I'm talking about the notion of rationality arising from cognitive science, not Hollywood. Rationality is the art of making decisions that are ever more effective at moving your life and the world toward your values. Note that if moving the world toward your values requires actually interacting with the world, it usually helps to have accurate beliefs about the world. When your map doesn't match the territory, it's a lot harder to get where you're trying to go. 

Rationality activism means working collaboratively at the grass-roots level to make ourselves, each other, and the world more rational.

Religion is not responsible for all of human irrationality. It preys on and exacerbates what irrationality already exists. With or without religion, we are predictably irrational. We make certain kinds of mistakes over and over again, simply because our brains must cut a lot of corners to navigate our fast-paced, complex environment. If everyone was expected, and given the tools, to patch these bugs in their cognitive programming, religion wouldn't stand a chance in the first place.

In a post to lesswrong.com, Eliezer Yudkowsky proposes a thought experiment along the following lines. Imagine you have the opportunity to teach everybody one general method of rationality that is directed at making people more effective human beings, and it can't target religion in particular. What might you do to raise the sanity waterline high enough that religion goes under?

Well, maybe there is no one particular method that could make that happen. But we are, at the very least, narrowing in on a group of habits of thought that make people better at thinking critically, testing hypotheses, and avoiding—or at least mitigating the damage caused by—the cognitive biases we were all born with. The world where everyone consistently practices these kinds of habits is the one I'm really after. The fact that it probably doesn't include religion is merely an added bonus.

So hey, we don't have to funnel all our passion, frustration, and other forces driving us to get out there and change the world for the better into banging on church doors hoping for deconversions. Neither do we have to settle for leveling the playing field so atheists are treated just as well--and just as poorly--as theists. We don't have to fight against religion, thereby letting it set the terms of our activism.

Instead, we can work together to fight for rationality.

Many thanks to Robby Bensinger and Jesse Galef for the feedback loops of brilliant geekery without which this might not have happened.

I think actual game play would work best with felt and velcro.

There is clearly a rational basis justifying the traditional definition of marriage. The key reason that marriage has existed at all in any society and at any time is that sexual relationships between men and women naturally produce children. Society has no particular interest in a platonic relationship between a man and a woman no matter how close, no matter how committed it may be.

But civil marriage is not about children and hasn’t been since 1964. Before that year, it was illegal in Connecticut for doctors to provide council to couples asking about contraception. Estelle Griswold, then director of the Planned Parenthood League of Connecticut, was convicted of violating this law when she and the League’s medical director were caught advising couples on methods of birth control. She appealed, and in the end the law was struck down by the US Supreme Court, ruling that it violated the right to privacy implicit in the Bill of Rights.

The case’s direct effect was to grant married couples the right to use contraceptives; but other results were far more profound. Griswold v Connecticut impacted marriage law in two giant ways. It first established that the first, third, fourth, and ninth amendments together create a right to privacy within marriage. Additionally, in protecting under that right the freedom to employ contraception, all legally recognized sexual relationships thereafter no longer existed in law for the purpose of bearing children, as the sexually active couple was free to choose indefinitely to not conceive. By legalizing contraception for married couples the case divorced civil marriage from the conception of children. Whatever the purpose of civil marriage, it is not that proposed by Carles Cooper and his compatriots.

So much for positive grounds for civil marriage. Onward to my own claim.

Civil marriage is not only groundless but positively unconstitutional. Specifically, it violates the 14th amendment’s equal protection clause with respect to the class of unmarried individuals. There is precedent supporting its lack of a rational basis, but I claim further that it fails every other step of the equal protection test as well.

Shortly after the Griswald case, a similar scene went down in Massachusetts. In 1971, pro-choice activist William Baird gave a lecture at Boston University on birth control and overpopulation. After the lecture he gave a spermicidal foam to a woman in the audience. In Massachusetts, contraceptives could be distributed legally only by registered medical professionals, and then only to married couples. As neither condition was met in this case, the state charged Baird with a felony. The defense argued that the Massachusetts law violated the right to privacy noted in the Griswold case seven years earlier.

In the end, the law was overthrown, but not because of the right to privacy. The pertinent question was re-framed like this: Rather than asking whether the right to privacy applied to the sex lives of singles as well, the court asked whether there ever were grounds for differentiating between married and unmarried people in the first place.

To understand the court’s ruling and its broader significance, you have to know about the interpretation of the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment employed in law. See, the actual wording of the amendment is,

No State shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.

But the broadest interpretation of the text would make most legislation impossible. If this actually meant that every law must apply to all citizens equally, there could not be, for instance, distinctions in legislation between eight-year-olds and fifty-year-olds, nor between billionaires and the poor. To prevent this stalemate, whenever a question arises regarding the validity of distinctions between groups, the group getting shafted undergoes an “equal protection test”.

Here's how the test works.

1. First we ask, “Is the characteristic defining the group immutable?” Skin color and gender, for instance, are immutable. Choice of vehicle is not. Obviously, not all defining characteristics are so unequivocal.
2. If the answer to the first question is yes, the distinction is subject to “strict scrutiny” which means asking, “Is there a compelling argument that the state has a legitimate interest in protecting one group and not the other?” If the answer to that is yes as well, then the law in question can be upheld. Otherwise it’s unconstitutional.
3. If the answer to the first question is “no”, then the second question becomes, “Does the group under review have a history of maltreatment?” If yes, the state may have an ulterior motive for legislating against them, which again triggers strict scrutiny.
4. If there is no immutable characteristic and no history of maltreatment, we move on to the question of whether or not a fundamental interest is at stake. Fundamental interests are a purposefully hazy class of which the most famous are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. If an interest the court deems fundamental is at stake, strict scrutiny is triggered.
5. If not, the law can be upheld as long as there is some “rational basis” for the distinction. The rational basis test is a very easy one to pass, because any reasonable ground whatsoever applies. Very few cases involve distinctions that failed rational basis.

Eisenstaedt v. Baird is one of those few. Though the defense’s initial criticism of the Massachusetts law concerned an extension of the right to privacy, the case moved into equal protection law when singles were identified as an insular group against which the state legislated. An equal protection test was clearly in order.

Is it constitutional to uphold a law granting rights to married people that singles are denied?

In this case, singles made it all the way through the first three sections; according to the judges, the group was not defined by an immutable characteristic, did not have a history of maltreatment, and there were no fundamental interests at stake. Ultimately, though, there was simply no legitimate interest for the state, no “rational basis”, that warranted distinguishing between married and single people in awarding the right to use contraceptives.

The implications of that ruling are potentially much, much more extensive than anyone seems to realize. As far as I can tell, non-married people have delighted in their equal right to use contraceptives and have left it at that; efforts toward "marriage equality" remain overwhelmingly focused on extending marital benefits to same-sex couples, while attempts to secure further equality for single citizens barely exist. Though married people enjoy 1,049 federal rights and benefits denied to the unmarried, singles seem oblivious to their own marginalization.

Assuming, keeping with the Eisenstadt ruling, that the unmarried don’t warrant strict scrutiny, the tedious enterprise of examining every marital right and benefit for a rational basis may appear excessive. When running singles through the full equal protection test, however, I obtain very different results from those judged in 1971. If it happens that upon further consideration the unmarried fail every single step of the equal protection test, the process of awarding them far-reaching equality may be streamlined.

Conveniently, that’s exactly the case.

Let’s take it from the top: the first step is immutability. Is the class of unmarried people defined by an immutable characteristic? At first glance it doesn't look like it. After all, marriage is something you can opt into or out of. No one has to stay single, right? (Note: I’ve actually heard people argue that, “Even gay men can marry women.”)

It’s actually not quite that simple. It helps to keep in mind that the defining characteristic in question is that of the unmarried. The status of “married” certainly isn’t immutable, as anyone can say “no” to a proposal, and anyone can get a divorce. But “unmarried” is a default state that was never initially chosen by anyone, and it’s simply not true that every adult is totally free to opt out of the unmarried status. First of all, it isn’t something that can be done alone; unlike choosing a car or a career, it requires an equal commitment by another person. While individuals have full freedom regarding their own decision to remain in or resign from the single class, they have no direct reign over the decisions of potential marriage partners. Since “unmarried” is the default state, an individual can not actually choose freely to exit the class into which she was born, making it an immutable characteristic.

Secondly, there are plenty of clear barriers indefinitely preventing some people from getting married. Some who desire marriage simply fail to find a partner, and others may not have access to marriage due to physical or mental illness. That alone is enough to trigger strict scrutiny (as opposed to the rational basis test, or “ordinary scrutiny”, applied in Eisenstadt v. Baird). But there’s more.

The second question is, “Does the group have a history of maltreatment?” The Supreme Court of 1971 must have experienced a temporary lapse in most cognitive faculties to have answered “no” to this question. The correct answer is unassailably “yes”, and especially for the subclass of unmarried women. Until fairly recently it was nearly impossible for an unmarried woman to support herself, because the entire structure of society was built around the bias toward patriarchal marriage. An adult woman without a husband underwent severe economic and social maltreatment, all the worse if she bore children. The economic maltreatment in particular continues today, largely as a result of the rights denied to the unmarried.

In summary thus far: the defining characteristic of the class in question is immutable and there is a clear history of maltreatment. Is there also a fundamental interest at stake? Does legislation against singles encroach upon some basic, fundamental human right?

Yes, it does. In the past, identifications of fundamental interests in Supreme Court cases have included the right to parent. There are many ways in which legislation against the unmarried encumbers parenting. Robin West enumerates:

All unmarried parents… both the truly single, and those in committed, but unmarried relationships, will find their parenting burdened by marriage laws, and by the scores of financial benefits withheld them by virtue of that status. Unmarried poor parents will not have a deceased marital partner’s Social Security or military pension on which to draw—nor will she have the possibility of drawing on that of a deceased companion, coparent, or intimate. She will not have the benefit of favorable tax treatment, or private health insurance provided to spouses, that are routinely accorded married persons. She will not have a partner with a virtual “power of attorney” to make decisions on her behalf or that of her children, should she become incapacitated. Either directly or indirectly, the law is deeply implicated in a regime that has an adverse impact upon a class of people trying to engage in a basic, fundamental life activity—bearing, nurturing, and raising children—and trying to do so outside the protective perimeters of marriage.

Obviously, government intervention or no, single parents face challenges to which couples are not subject. It is the fundamental right of an individual to confront those challenges and raise her children, with or without a co-parent. The problem is not that single parents have a tougher time overall. It’s that a prodigious portion of that hardship is caused by the denial of marital benefits to unmarried parents. Surely, if parents are receiving federal aid in caring for their children, single parents need it most. But that’s not the world we’re living in. Not yet.

Finally, does the state have any interest whatsoever in denying rights to single people it affords to married couples? Remember Griswald vs Connecticut. The many arguments founded on the state’s interest in procreation are void. Arguments for the stability life-long partnerships create in society are flimsy as well; no-fault divorce means a marriage can end at any time. There is no longer any legal obligation to remain married, and a third of US marriages last less than ten years.

The most legitimate interest the state might have in the institution of civil marriage is the care members of a marriage provide for each other. Whenever one individual supports another in a time of need, she removes that responsibility from the state. Ideally, married couples engage in this kind of support consistently, and they’re rewarded copiously for it through their many rights and benefits. It makes sense for the government to actively encourage and fortify such care-giving behavior.

But the exclusive identification of marriage with relationships of care-giving is transparently mistaken. Humans are social creatures, so when something goes wrong we look to the networks of support in which we find ourselves. Those networks are invaluable not only to individuals but to the state, and they are far more diverse than the traditional husband/wife family model. The enterprise of care-giving can take innumerable forms: a lesbian couple raising a child, a middle-aged man caring for his elderly mother, a woman and her male best friend together raising children from previous marriages, or a man supporting his chronically ill brother, to name a small handful.

Take another look at the words of Charles Cooper.

The key reason that marriage has existed at all in any society and at any time is that sexual relationships between men and women naturally produce children. Society has no particular interest in a platonic relationship between a man and a woman no matter how close, no matter how committed it may be.

The truth is, society has no legitimate interest in the private sexual lives of citizens, but it has every interest in close and committed relationships whether or not they be of a sexual nature as well. By indiscriminately distributing financial support to married couples who may not require it solely by virtue of their presumably sexual partnership, less funding remains for singles in selfless, draining, committed care-giving positions. There is no rational basis for providing financial benefits and other civil rights to married people while denying them to the unmarried.

The legal distinction between marital statuses fails the equal protection test many times over, serves no state interest, and harms society as a whole. Yes, it is horrible that, in the US, gay people can’t marry each other while straight people can. But if we’re serious about equality for all, we should be dissolving civil marriage. Not expanding it.